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by
Adam Gopnik
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March 20 - April 7, 2020
This is as good a capsule description of the history of Nazism or Stalinism as one can imagine: first the thirst for power, then the
Shakespeare believed in charity and forgiveness, too—justice and order tempered by mercy and cheer.
Untune the lute of life, and discord follows.
A love of order can be felt just as strongly by the impoverished as the insolent; in fact, Johnson thought, the impoverished need order more, since they have fewer means for buying themselves out of natural anarchy.
Burke, as hallowed a name among the right as Mill is among liberals, actually spent most of his parliamentary life arguing in favor of the great liberal revolution of his day, the American one, and trying to impeach Warren Hastings, the brutal colonial ruler of India,
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 say that liberalism is the natural enemy of community, and of the families and traditions that make communities stable, and that stable communities are essential to happy lives.
Order, in both the family and in society, is the concern uniting conservatives, and liberal reform its natural enemy.
Most often, 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.
Liberals want government to be large enough, for instance, to enforce gun control laws, but not intrusive enough to have anything to do with women and their reproductive choices.
Disraeli, the great Conservative leader, was just the opposite. He was gay, overdressed, and Jewish.
Yet, he came to lead the party of the landed gentry, who mistrusted him, and helped fashion the rhetoric of what we think of as modern, mainstream conservatism.
Why aren’t the people sharing our values if they share our problems?
De Gaulle came to see that the republic and its magic words liberty, equality, and fraternity—not the near-Vichyite ones of fatherland and family, which he had first favored—would alone serve France in all its fullness.
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,
De Gaulle crafted a symbolic history for the French in place of a real one because the symbols were among the most real things they knew.
The patriot loves his place and its monarch and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies;
The politics of national grandeur,
“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
The people who cut the king’s head off were in the grip of a big idea so intoxicating that it annihilated their ability to see past their own bloodlust.
Tom Paine was horrified at the killing of the king and queen because he knew how the murder would diminish the dignity of the French Revolution; Burke was horrified because of how it would diminish the dignity of kings.
Secularism, cosmopolitanism, permissiveness, relativism:
Reduced to despair by the loss of all familiar certainties, a majority of ordinary people lash out at an establishment that shows so little empathy with their existence, even if it means choosing an irrational-seeming course like isolation from Europe or embracing an obvious gangster-clown like Trump.
“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.” Without authority derived ultimately from God, we have
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Manet and his followers depicted in some of the most moving images of muted domestic—and explosive urban—joy that have ever been painted. As the impressionists remind us, the neutral state, the plural city, that liberalism constructs is never neutral emotionally. It shines.
There’s nothing weaker than a strongman state, even when there’s nothing louder than the strongman.
If what is genuinely wanted is space for faith practices—rather than power for one of them alone—then no societies have opened more doors to the spiritual life than the liberal democracies or offered more shelter for worship.
The greatest English-speaking poet of the mid-twentieth century, W. H. Auden, was a liberal in politics and a sincere and passionate Christian; the greatest critic of the same time, his good friend William Empson, was a liberal in politics and a sincere and passionate polemicist against Christianity.
The hidden metaphysics of liberalism is simply that it values debate and hates dogma and accepts doubleness.
The common room at Glendon
What liberals have, he thought, is better than a religion. It is a way of life.
Liberals believe that the authoritarian choice between a world with certainty and a world of chaos is a false one. Between anarchy and authority lies argument.
The art of conversation
“Free societies,” as a matter of practical fact, always mean free-market societies—and free markets will never sponsor more than predatory capitalism. Inequalities don’t often emerge. They always emerge, and their emergence creates greater and greater injustice and despair.
At one point, she went to work as a midwife, and she writes piteously about the demands of working-class women for abortion—women with five or six children already and barely able to feed them.
But for most of the past thirty years, for good or ill, questions about labor and the shop floor have become less central to radical criticism of liberalism, and questions of gender, race, language, and sexual orientation ever more so.
American situation in which the right wing wants cultural victories and gets nothing but political ones; while the left wing wants political victories and gets only cultural ones.
Liberalism preceded modern science, and humanism preceded both—and liberalism does not demand in any way an exclusive commitment to materialism: it is perfectly possible to be a liberal Catholic or a liberal agnostic or a liberal rabbi.
Einstein, being a Jew, couldn’t be right about the universe; the theory of relativity could be condemned in advance by knowing the essential racial nature of its maker. Those who attacked Frederick Douglass in the pre–Civil War period all insisted that he must be lying about his history as a slave because he was black. Modern art is bad because it is the expression of Jews; jazz is bad because it is the music of “Negroes.”
Popularized in France—it’s a French word, of course—it is still used, sneeringly, to this day. There are bourgeois amenities and bourgeois worldviews and bourgeois Bohemians. There’s no quicker formula for dismissing liberal views than to reduce them to bourgeois interests.
But the ethical choice that good fortune brings remains the same, whether earned or given. Those with good fortune can try to share it, or those with good fortune can decide to hoard it. Between the hoarders and the sharers is a huge historical gap, which defines what liberalism is. It’s the space where liberalism begins.
This is, yes, liberal universalism, but the reason that liberals are universalists is not because they think that everyone is always one thing but rather that, knowing that everyone is many things at once, they want everyone to act with maximum fairness all the time. You can embrace difference and reject discrimination—rejecting discrimination is
The legendary 1947 memo that Clark Clifford, a White House counsellor, sent to Harry Truman (it may have had multiple authors) outlining what was then an improbable path to victory in the presidential election, simply lists all the pressure groups on the Democratic side—farmers, Jews, Negroes, organized labor, Southerners—and explains how to keep them all in your hand without having to discard any, as if playing political gin rummy, a favorite card game of the period.
We can ask them, sometimes successfully, to share instead of hoard
fluidity
Thinking about public arguments and public debate leads us—there’s no escaping it—to another stormy issue, that of free speech and its discontents.
The liberal view of free speech comes down to us from that bedrock document, Mill’s 1859 “On Liberty.”
Unless the speaker is actually about to cut your throat, you have to let him work his jaw.
For liberals, free speech is a nearly sacrosanct principle and should be curbed only at the absolute extreme. Freedom to criticize without fear is essential to the search for new knowledge, and without new facts—and the new ideas they discipline—we cannot reform our ideas or our behavior.
But there was a time when you put your very life in jeopardy speaking them. You could be ripped apart limb from limb on a public scaffold for saying so. That time was a preliberal or antiliberal one. We must never return to it.
Hate speech is a real thing and should be stopped. To take the most vivid instance, Canada has sturdy laws against hate speech. Holocaust denial, in the Canadian view, may be simply a lie, damaging to our memory and an act of deliberate cruelty to those who survived the camps. You can’t say it because it isn’t true and does harm.
One case, on which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, was against a Saskatchewan man who had passed out antigay literature, accusing gay teachers of sharing “filth and propaganda” and teaching “sodomy” to their students. Another of his pamphlets showed that the Bible clearly defines homosexuality as “abomination” and that Sodom and Gomorrah were “destroyed by God’s wrath” as a result of homosexual “perversion.” (In America, these views are commonplace; the pamphleteer could probably get a seat on a federal court.) In Canada, the Supreme Court found that the provincial law that forced him to
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