Does Liberalism Have An Aesthetic?

Who Is Liberalism's Riefenstahl?

1

“There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there is almost nothing comparable about the dull tint at the end of history. Where is liberalism’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’? Who is its Riefenstahl?”

So writes Becca Rothfeld, in an energetic, sharp, fun, and highly critical review of two books, one by yours truly (On Liberalism, if you want to know). https://thepointmag.com/criticism/listless-liberalism/

Rothfeld’s review is called Listless Liberalism (ouch).

On my little effort, she writes: “The book’s first chapter, a list of statements about liberalism initially published in the opinion section of the New York Times in 2023 and later bloated into a lengthier manifesto, is full of coarse generalizations, some of which are plainly false and several of which Sunstein goes on to contradict.”

(Big ouch.)

2

Still, I much like Rothfeld’s essay, and I much like her topic and her challenge. She thinks that the liberalism I depict is dull, colorless, and “listless.”

She likes art and dance and music. She wants “[t]he sort of art and argument that could make its audience want to be liberal,” which “would have to begin by regarding its audience as agents.” She doesn’t like “a hall monitor’s love of rules and regulations; both wish to reduce the gnarl of a person to the simple purity of a plot on a graph.”

(Ouch again; but this time a good, amused ouch.)

She says: “Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity.”

(Uh oh. That last sentence is cringe writing. One good ouch deserves another.)

Still, fair questions: Does liberalism have an aesthetic? Does it have a Riefenstahl? Rothfeld thinks that current liberalism “has a tone and a texture. It has, in short, what a very different sort of liberal once called ‘manners.’” (Manners. Yuck.)

She goes further:

Among the marquee mannerisms of recent liberalism we find chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word “nuance,” glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine. The smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics amounts to aesthetics too.

Ouch (the best one yet).

She adds: “What the post-liberals get right—and the reason they are winning—is that the end of history has been sallow, ugly and deflating. Theirs is decidedly not an intellectual objection. It is not even an ethical objection, though it is often trussed up in the trappings of moral outrage. At its core, it is an aesthetic aversion.”

3

That is interesting indeed. It might be great. I am not sure that it is entirely true, but it has a lot of truth in it. What might be said in response?

There are two answers. I suspect that Rothfeld would be unenthusiastic and eye-rolly about the first and more interested in the second.

4

The first response is that liberalism has no aesthetic. Liberalism is defined by certain commitments, about all to freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. (Each of these has to be specified, of course; freedom includes, above all, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.) Liberalism is a big tent, and tents do not have (much of) an aesthetic.

You can be a liberal and adore Mozart and Suzanne Farrell. You can be a liberal and think that Olivia Rodrigo and Stephen King speak deeply to you. You can be a liberal and love Samuel Beckett. You can be a liberal and dislike music and dance. You can be a liberal and worship Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez.

If you want an aesthetic, you shouldn’t look to liberalism to find it. And you shouldn’t have an aesthetic aversion to liberalism, either. That’s in the nature of a category mistake.

There is a larger point here. Some people want, more than anything, an ism that will give meaning to life, or some kind of spiritual guidance. There are plenty of isms that can do that. Liberalism isn’t one of them. That isn’t its point.

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Here is the second response.

Want liberalism’s aesthetic? Have a look at this:

Here we go: “It's a shame, the way she makes me scrub the floor/I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.”

Even better, try this:

Dylan famously had this to say about “Like A Rolling Stone”: “I found myself writing this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long. It was just a rhythm thing on a paper, all my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest… out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’”

If you just read the words of a song on the page, you can understand its origins in “steady hatred”:

Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

That is harsh. That doesn’t sound very liberal, not at all.

But if you listen to those words as Dylan sings them, you immediately see that the song is not great because it displays pleasure or glee in the downfall of someone who once rode high. That would be cheap and lifeless (and listless).

What makes “Like A Rolling Stone” great, a liberal anthem, is that it is a song of freedom:

How does it feel, ah how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Of course these words can be, and have been, sung in many different ways. But as Dylan sings them, the steady hatred, directed at some place that is honest, is not exactly not there, but it is transformed into a celebration (“ah how does it feel”), coming from some place that is honest – an exhilarating celebration of life, unpredictability, change, and being busy being born.

So Like A Rolling Stone is indeed a liberal anthem. You could argue that it captures a (the?) liberal aesthetic.

So, Ms. Rothfeld, here’s the answer to your question: Bob Dylan is liberalism’s Riefenstahl.

Here’s a more liberal way to put it. A variety of artists do, for their audiences, or for you, what Dylan does for many of us. They capture liberalism’s aesthetic.

They are an army of Riefenstahls.

6

I am not satisfied with what I have just written. I know better. What appears in (4) above is correct. You can reject “Like A Rolling Stone” in every way, and value traditions, and insist that if you are on your own, with no direction home, you are in a kind of hell - and you can do that while still being a liberal.

My head, or my System 2 (see Kahneman), knows that the right answer to Rothfeld, as a matter of principle, is that liberalism isn’t the right place to look if you want an aesthetic.

But let’s put that sensible stuff to one side. Here’s a liberal song: