Why Liberals Are Losing It

IT NEVER STOPS: The pursuit of identifying the cause of liberalism’s slow death and finding words to resurrect it. From aphorism-rich monographs (Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics) to footnote-heavy tomes on the decline and impending demise of an idea that moulded the global order of freedom and modernity, the arc of liberalism has become an endless enquiry, an intellectual urgency for the disillusioned liberals certainly. The profusion caters to the anxieties of its believers, and is perhaps validated by the rule of the brutes riding simulated nationalism and populists who have turned illiberalism into a democratic impulse, the same class Anne Applebaum portrays in Autocracy, Inc.: “Shored up by technologies and tactics they copy from one another, by their common economic interests, and above all by their determination not to give up power, the autocracies believe that they are winning.” A new book with a title as evocative as Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism (Allen Lane, 416 pages, £25) shows why the pursuit is still a necessary endeavour for those alarmed by the corruption of the ideal.

What sets apart the argument of Adrian Wooldridge, a prolific author and journalist, is that, while navigating the debris of the liberal order with historical diligence, he places the causes and remedies not in academic abstracts but in the fears and pathologies of the present. To restore liberal values in a world populated by not just outright hawkers of illiberalism but me-alone nationalists in strictly regulated democracies is to repudiate extremism, for, in the core of an idea that came out of the rejection of the certainties espoused by revolutions as well as religion lies an appreciation of moderation and tolerance. Those virtues are in retreat now. And the culprits are liberals themselves.

They have abandoned the liberal position of the “vital centre” and pushed the arguments too far to the extremes: “Neoliberals got so excited about free markets that they supported the legalisation of drugs regardless of the logic of addiction. Liberal internationalists got so enthusiastic about democracy and human rights that they supported imposing them at the point of a bayonet in Iraq and Afghanistan. Progressive liberals put so much emphasis on the freedom of the individual that they supported biological men who identified as women to enter women’s changing rooms or women’s prisons.” This kind of extremism may have enabled the conservative right in America to steal the conversations on social morality and economic justice from the Democrats steeped in identity politics. The liberals, by choosing certainties over fluidity and tribalism over individualism, have begun to resemble the dictatorship of conscience control they have historically raged against.

Although Wooldridge doesn’t use that word, self-righteousness has driven liberals to the politics of rejectionism, which makes contempt a moral weapon. He is bang-on: “Liberals instinctively dismiss populist leaders as buffoons and populist causes as examples of the madness of crowds. Yet populist buffoons have repeatedly out-thought the professors, populist causes have motivated millions, and liberals have repeatedly found themselves puffing along behind the despised populists, perched on a penny-farthing. Far from burning themselves out, populist parties are setting the agenda for the new politics.” One cardinal sin of liberals which ceded the political space they once owned in the West to populists is seeing immigration as a mandatory virtue of governments. They have not stopped paying the price.

In the end, the so-called liberal elite has become misplaced advocates of group-salvation: identity needs to be indexed for verifying the degree of injustice. A Zohran Mamdani may have launched designer socialism for a generation, but liberals have let down an idea that sustained a rules-based world order for so long. Its restoration won’t happen unless liberals learn to be liberal. Most isms promise a larger-than-the-real destination, if only the individual subordinates the self to a higher moral system. If you remain morally a Marxist, the individualisation of society is only as good as the fragmentation of justice. And the sense of communitarianism that runs through the middle path favoured by those who refuse to be left or right, too, makes individualism conditional. Liberalism should not restrict the individual. Wooldridge argues that liberalism can restore its genius only if liberals are modest enough to liberate themselves from their pet constructs of truth, which are increasingly removed from popular sentiments. Liberals, abhorring honest conversations, only listen to their own voices. As Wooldridge writes, “today’s liberal elite cries out for reform not only because it is visibly failing but also because, in all too many ways, it deserves to fail.”

Their failure highlights more than the creaky liberal order. It is the failure of imagination in the age of hallucinatory power.