A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

When people say that Rustin was the mastermind behind the 1963 March on Washington (Dr. King basically arrived to give a speech in the place that Rustin had assigned for him), what they mean can seem nebulous. He thought of it? No, what he did was to organize it. He worked day and night with a team of kids on West 130th Street to make it happen.

Because American progressivism is, alongside French conservatism, the most schismatic of all faiths, with lifelong resentments governing everyone in turn and new schisms springing up every minute, Rustin had to exert a full court press to bring everyone together.

He wanted to seed the world with sanity. What makes his letters to his brutal jailors so moving is that he appeals to them as ordinary men with ordinary desires.

What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our divided minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction. A belief in radical change through practial measures. A readiness to act—nonviolently but visibly and sometimes in the face of threatened violence—

on behalf of equality. A belief that life should be fair—or fairer, or as fair as seems fair: people’s lives should not be overdetermined by who their parents were or how much money they might have inherited or what shade of skin their genes have woven. A belief that the individual pursuit of eccentric happiness can be married to a common faith in fair procedure.

The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.

why, then, is liberalism so set upon, so broadly unpopular in so many ways? Two ferocious critiques, one from the left and one from the right, exist to explain it. And, yes, being a liberal means being perpetually engaged in a two-front war, like Hercules with the two snakes in his birth cradle, one in his right hand, the other in his left.

The right-wing critique of liberalism is largely an attack on its overreliance on reason; the left-wing one, mostly an attack on its false faith in reform. The right-wing assault also tends to focus on the evil that liberalism does internally to the traditional communities and nations it betrays; the left wing pays attention, as well, and sometimes more often, to the evil that liberalism does externally to its distant victims in the foreign countries it exploits.

Mill himself said that social life is made up of conflicting half-truths, not absolutes anyone owns.

the most important need human beings have is for order. Order not merely in their daily lives but in their world. Without order, everything collapses. The order may come down from God and be “natural,” or it may be artificial and made up, but it is essential.

Change risks order, and then only later realizes what the loss of order has cost ordinary people.

Among right-wing critics of liberalism, the emphasis on social order is grounded in something still more primal: a reverence for the natural order of family and community.

they will say that they believe in strong armies, low taxes, and, perhaps above all, limited government. Permit me to be skeptical about this self-description. I don’t actually think that limited or large government matters as much in distinguishing contemporary liberals from constitutional conservatives as we are told it does. All of us want just as large a government as suits the current needs of our values and programs. Statism may or may not be a sin, but if it is, it is a sin neither of liberal left nor liberalish right.

What actually and effectively separates liberal and mainstream conservative parties and politicians, seen squarely, are certain ideas about respect and certain rituals of reverence—particularly respect for the military and reverence for religion.

They are an endlessly fascinating pair, whose lives tell us much about the temperament essential for liberals and conservatives—temperament being at least as important as fixed principles for analyzing the kinds—and how those temperaments do and don’t become principles.

Gladstone, in turn, was a liberal internationalist avant la lettre, in favor of an intervention on humanitarian grounds in the “Bulgarian horrors” committed by the Ottomans in the 1870s.

It was Disraeli’s guess that an enfranchised working population would be as likely to support imperialist pride as social solidarity, and it turned out to be one of the shrewdest guesses in the history of modern political life.

identity, or national pride if you prefer, has proven time and again to be incomparably more powerful than economic self-interest narrowly defined. Why jingoism should be of such overwhelming appeal to the working classes, easily trumping apparently obvious differences in interests between themselves and the economic imperialists, is a central mystery of the modern age, at least to liberals.

The central political idea that de Gaulle intuited was the one he shared with Disraeli: myths matter. Without a sense of common significance and shared symbols, it is impossible for any modern state to go on.

The distinction that’s sometimes made between patriotism and nationalism is the essence of de Gaulle’s politics, as it had been in many ways of Disraeli’s. The patriot loves his place and its monarch and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it) but employs his obsessive sense of encirclement and grievance on behalf of acts of ethnic vengeance.

The idea that the appearance of submission and obedience and rank are essential to order is at the heart of the conservative ideal—even when practical politics may lead elsewhere.

Burke’s horrified reaction to the killing of the French king and queen helps point us toward another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason. It shares Burke’s sense of the chaos that could follow from the belief that society should be remade all at once on the basis of a big idea, with tradition and custom annihilated.

Certainly, of all the accounts of this process I’ve read, the best—better even than Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir by J. D. Vance—is by Chrissie Hynde, the pop singer who founded The Pretenders, in her autobiography Reckless.

What makes the radical right-wing communitarian complaint distinct from the left-wing attack on liberalism—which blames capitalism for all this human pain, first and last—is that it almost always places the blame for the loss of identity on the loss of authority.

The right, partly for reasons of convenience—they tend to be funded by the corporate people who helped ruin Akron—but largely for reasons of conviction, believe that it is liberal elites, not capitalism, that are most to blame for the destruction of community. Globalization may have despoiled Akron; it was liberal elites who demoralized its people.

They were manipulated by the plutocrats of Walmart, and then mocked by the graduates of Wesleyan.

These more extreme authoritarian attacks on liberalism come in three basic kinds. Let’s call their believers for simplicity’s sake—and with the obvious understanding that they cross over and hybridize in many intricate ways—triumphalist authoritarians, theological authoritarians, and tragic authoritarians. The first attack liberal weakness; the second, liberal materialism; the last, liberal hubris.

For the triumphalist authoritarian, the test of our tribe is its dominance over the other tribes. The only real way of judging a society is not in terms of its culture or even its prosperity but simply in terms of its power. A country could be rich, free—and humiliated. That’s far worse than being impoverished and proud.

They believe in domination—whoever wins, rules. Get your opponents before they get you. This is why, historically, triumphalist tough guys hate liberalism and liberals far more than they hate the other kinds of authoritarianism.

But the simpler and scarier and more important truth is that one or other kind of triumphalist authoritarianism has been the default condition of government for almost all of human history.

So rather than search for the special circumstances that make it rise (economic anxiety? racial prejudice?), we should accept the truth that it can always rise, that the lure of a closed authoritarian society is one permanently present in human affairs, and that the real question is not what makes it happen but what, for brief periods of historical time, has kept it from happening.

(As Philip Roth pointed out toward the end of his life, Charles Lindbergh was, at least, a genuine hero, while Donald Trump is not even a competent businessman.)

Hitler, whom we suspect of being an embittered, envious, traumatized loser, presents himself as an embittered, envious, traumatized loser. His resentments are ever present.

The second kind of authoritarianism is less powerful in contemporary practice but far more formidable intellectually. We can call it theological or sometimes theistic authoritarianism.

Theological authoritarians hate liberalism not because liberals are weak but because they seem so strong, so arrogant and complacent in their denial of divine truth.

The early twentieth-century English—and latterly Roman Catholic—writer and lecturer G. K. Chesterton was one of the most original, and by far the wittiest, of the religious dissidents from the liberal imagination. Dissatisfied with a merely parliamentary model of life, he put together a potent and charming mix of neomedievalism and Catholic nostalgia and described a purer world of heightened numinous feeling than that of the materialism he saw all around him in Edwardian England.

“Reason is always a kind of brute force,” Chesterton wrote, in one of his matchless aphorisms. “Those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” Elsewhere he offered the clearest statement of the theological authoritarian’s complaint: “Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes around the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health—these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.”

What’s curious about the books in this God-minded tradition—the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen has recently produced an impassioned and influential one called, bluntly, Why Liberalism Failed—is that, though they’re always written ostensibly in response to a very specific circumstance (the dire spiritual condition of France in 1905, the moral crisis of America in 2018), they always say exactly the same things and propose exactly the same cure. Chesterton was an inspired aphorist, while Deneen writes in a version of American academese. But one could wholly subsume one critique into the other.

Liberalism, we are told, in different voices but always in nearly the same words, succeeds only in a world “stripped of custom, and the kinds of institutions that transmitted cultural norms, habituated responsibility, and cultivated ordinary virtues.” That kind of success should only be called failure.

This more philosophical edge of the religious rejection of liberalism leads us finally to a less visible but in its way more profound right-wing creed, not necessarily theistic or even religious, which we can call tragic authoritarianism. It is the authoritarianism of one of my intellectual heroes, a man we’ve already encountered and who I love: the eighteenth-century journalist and philosopher, Samuel Johnson. He thought that life was too sad to be cured by politics. Even good government ended in death. It is also a form of the attack on liberalism one finds as well in the so-called Straussians, followers of the Jewish American classical philosopher Leo Strauss.

The past is in a real sense the only place we have.

Where we need to invest ourselves is not in pointless programs of material betterment but in training in self-recognition. This is not a position that many working politicians would subscribe to or even understand. But it helps explain the oft-remarked silence of some conservative intellectuals about authoritarian leaders—and their search for a “heroic” politics outside the liberal dispensation.

The lines of this kind of reasoning run right from Heidegger and the other antirational philosophers of the early part of the twentieth century to such thinkers as Aleksandr Dugin, the house philosopher of the Putin regime, even known as Putin’s brain. (No one has been named, so far, as Trump’s.)

We may think of it as a revolt against reason, but what we’re living through is a revolt against liberal reason, against a kind of reason that reduces all difference to a “brand” and all blood ties to an archaic hoax and all difference to an archaic difficulty.

What can the liberal say in response to all of these assaults? First, that the broader communitarian assault on liberalism depends on a very false picture of what liberals have ever believed, or what liberals in power have, for good or ill, actually done. The idea that liberalism is narrowly devoted only to individual rights and the pursuit of selfish material well-being is a cartoon with little connection to liberal ideas or practices.

If we look at all the classic liberal texts and, more important, the actual historical political practices of liberalism, we see immediately that all have a powerful idea of collectivity and community at their heart. Adam Smith is not Ayn Rand.

As Habermas and Putnam have each in their different ways shown us, liberal political practices rest on liberal social practices—the Declaration of the Rights of Man begins with a conversation in a café, and local democracy has a better chance of triumphing in Italy when amateur opera groups sing out first.

What’s called liberal individualism always emerges from an assumed background of connectedness.

While the creation of community is central to the liberal ideal, the conservative dream of clan identity is itself a kind of unicorn. Nations and tribes are not the same, and clans are not communities.

Invariably, the whole notion that there is an uncorrupted clan or faith world out there is false. Whenever we go to actually examine that more organic society that liberalism has allegedly annihilated, it always turns out to be not organic at all, but as uncomfortably divided as our own and with more murderous rules of social exclusion.