Big-Tent Liberalism
On Freedom
My recent book, On Liberalism, is an effort to describe liberalism - big-tent liberalism, as I call it. It is not a book about President Trump or contemporary politics (though it was certainly written against the background that they help create).
There is a liberal political tradition. Benjamin Constant helped originate it. Kant helped define it. Mill was a liberal, and so was Susan Okin, and so was John Rawls. Joseph Raz was a liberal, and so is Charles Larmore. Stephen Holmes is a liberal, and so was Hayek.
Marx was not a liberal, and fascists are not liberals.
Liberals are committed to freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. Each of these ideas needs elaboration. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion get pride of place.
There is a lot of antiliberalism around these days. There are antiliberal forces in North America and Europe. We can find antiliberal forces on both the right and the left, and they sometimes even converge; but right now, right-of-center antiliberalism is the bigger threat.
My goal with the book was not to discuss current events, but to hold a spotlight up to the liberal tradition and to celebrate it.
You might be on the left and deplore the right. You might be on the right and deplore the left. You might love FDR (I certainly do). You might not love Reagan.
You might focus on contemporary politics and despise the current Republican party, not because it is illiberal (as it sometimes is, no doubt about it), but because it is seeking to demolish policies and principles that you cherish (including, to take just one example, the endangerment finding).
On Liberalism is not a book about why Democrats are better than Republicans, or why I like President Obama a lot better than any modern Republican president (though I do).
It is not a book about why so many of us have spent much of the last twenty years, in and out of government, on policies that, in our view, would make our country fairer and better (not least through laws and regulations that are reducing deaths and injuries, or that are helping people who are struggling most, or who have been treated unfairly for so long) .
Because liberalism is a big tent, some people, under that tent, will have serious objections to other people who are also under the tent.
I personally have serious objections, to say the least, to some things that other people who fall in the liberal camp strongly favor. That is not what the book is about. (I do have a book called The Second Bill of Rights, just reissued with a new preface, that is partly about that.)
I recently did an interview with the New Yorker, occasioned by my book, and while I thought the questions were sharp and fair, I think I regret having done it. Actually: Having done it makes me sick to my stomach. The main reason is that I have received vicious and savage hate mail (really vicious and savage; use your imagination; it’s worse than that; now use your imagination again; it’s worse than that; one more time; no, it’s worse than that).
Another reason is that some of my answers, meant to be a bit tongue in cheek, did not come out (let’s say) perfectly on the page. Yet another reason is that I was baffled and blindsided by questions about Henry Kissinger, whom my wife met when she was UN Ambassador. (I knew him mostly in his 90s, and while he was unfailingly generous and kind, I did not exactly spend much time with him; I have spent infinitely more time with my dogs, and would have preferred questions about them.)
During a dark and threatening time, it is not not useful to get clear on a tradition of thought that has stood as a bulwark against horror, and as a beacon of light to so many.
A chilling line from George Orwell: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Big as its tent may be, liberalism is meant to prevent boots from stamping on people’s faces - ever.
I don't begrudge Chotiner's asking tough-but-fair questions, but I found his plan of attack increasingly shallow and obtuse the more I read on, culminating in the absurd Kissinger diversion that clearly generated more heat than light and did you a disservice. For what it's worth, I found your responses characteristically generous, thoughtful, and compelling.
He resorted multiple times to the form of question, "You say this guy is on your liberal team, and yet he said or did this or that bad thing." You thus stood accused of appreciating some big ideas of people who sometimes said bad things. But it's not the bad things you're defending, and so his list of gotchas -- Hayek once said this, and this, Rothbard said that, Reagan opposed anti-discrimination laws -- seemed beside the point. This style of argument -- a sort of historical ad hominem -- is depressingly common now, depressing because it avoids good-faith engagement with ideas in favor of throwing stink.
I can barely glimpse in the stinky fog the outlines of a fair question. That question might go along the lines of, "You count conservatives like Reagan as liberals in the broad sense. And yet the conservative movement was in part grounded in opposition to civil rights. Reagan, for example, once voiced opposition to anti-discrimination laws on ostensibly libertarian grounds. The recent Buckley biography reminds us once again of his early support for formal white supremacy in the south, and not white supremacy in the woke sense but in the old-fashioned sense. Aren't civil rights a fundamental liberal value? Doesn't opposition to them put one outside even the big tent?" (Lots to say there; you said much of it in the interview.) But that wasn't his approach.
Other aspects bothered me. He seemed unfamiliar with the usage of "human rights" as referring to individual rights in relation to the state, of the sort found in the Bill of Rights, FDR's Second Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He seemed to think about it only in terms of foreign affairs. I also found striking his apparent resistance to the very idea of big-tent liberalism, an idea I certainly cherish, now more than ever insofar as it clarifies what's under threat and reminds us of what we should all agree on as Americans. It's as though he doesn't want to find agreement. He wants to say, they're bad, we're good, and the bad goes back to conservatives you say nice things about. What's this common ground b.s.? I mean, conservatives are liberals? Alito and Thomas aren't fascists? I find that "hard to believe"!
I used to be a lawyer. For many years now, I've been a high school teacher. I remember drawing a traditional left-right political spectrum on the board once -- the far right was fascism, the far left was communism, there were a few other labels, liberalism was in the middle, and, within that liberal center resided American conservatives and American liberals. Part of the idea was to highlight the relative lack of extremism in U.S. politics (this was some years ago), to highlight the liberal values we tended to share in practice, a sharing we took for granted amid the battles. Not that those battles were pointless food fights, far from it. They were important and interesting. But they took place under a big tent. We dismantle that tent at our peril.
The Second Bill of Rights is among my favorite books on the era, on FDR, on liberalism, on politics. This new one is on the way and I look forward to reading it.
Cheers