The Problem With Liberalism

Recently my teaching duties and pleasure reading have formed a perfect storm, prompting me to reflect the historical genealogy of liberalism. In my European history classes one theme this semester has been the retreat of classical liberalism in the face of mass politics at the turn of the century. In a world where the working classes could vote, middle class liberals were swamped and eventually sidelined. Just look at the European political scene today, where most countries sport socialist parties on the left and conservative parties on the right. (While the Tories adopted the principles of economic liberalism under Thatcher, they remained the party of the old elite and its values.) In particular, students in one of my classes have been reading from Carl Schorske's classic Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, whose main theme is the decline of liberal politics and culture in the face of avant-garde art and the exploitation of mass politics by the hard Right in turn of the century Austria. In my spare time I have been absorbing Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, an examination of why Nixon was able to rise from the ashes and become a two term president.

Like Schorske, Perlstein also examines liberal defeat, a defeat that came remarkably fast after LBJ's triumphal landslide versus Goldwater. He very effectively and very rightly links Nixon's resurrection not just with weariness over Vietnam, but primarily with the growing white working and middle class backlash against civil rights, a backlash that also set its sights on the Great Society. (Using the myth I tried to debunk the other day, that the white middle class doesn't benefit from the welfare state.) In both Austria and America, liberals held to core principles that betrayed them. Liberalism has its roots in the Enlightenment, and like good Enlightenment thinkers, liberals in both cases thought that being on the side of reason would win them a political victory. Once people understood why it was just for blacks to choose where they lived and went to school people would just accept because there was no reasonable argument against it.

This conceit might be the Enlightenment's biggest blind spot, that humans will stop doing wrong when they know better. While we humans can think, knowing that something is wrong has never stopped us from doing it, in fact it makes the pleasure of doing bad all the more sweet. I'll let Fyodor Dostoevsky (whom I have also reread recently) explain, he can do it more artfully than me:

"But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced,
who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does
not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes
were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do
nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being
enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own
advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man
can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a
time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with
the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and
have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to
this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the
beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult,
absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness."

This quotation pretty much explains the main problem I have with Thomas Frank (whom I have a great deal of respect for) when he argues that blue collar voters who vote for Republicans "vote against their interests." I guess he's right, but since when have people ever voted for their "rational interests"? Liberals have been getting killed at the ballot box in the last forty years because they are still under the illusion that voters will somehow just naturally see how liberals are the ones making the reasoned arguments. The use of homophobia in 2004 and the ugly "celebrity" ad attacking Obama both show that the other side does not trust in its ideas to win over the masses, and is wise not to.

What needs to be done? The political Left, be it liberal or not (not all on the Left are liberals, btw) needs to stop pretending it can sway the electorate with the force of its arguments alone. It needs to overestimate rather than underestimate the reservoirs of hatred in this country, and how they can be used against Obama and others. Last, liberals need to provide rhetorical food for the soul, not just the mind. (Of course, this should be done responsibly). If liberals don't, and complain about the unfairness of smears rather than punching back, expect yet another defeat.