Resurrecting liberalism

“Every day I wake up, and I just try to do right by my son,” Ms. Rachel said, tears sliding down her face, “because that was not done for me.” 

We stood in the middle of the hallway, people walking past pretending not to look. A feeling of nakedness enveloped the conversation as she stripped back the layers of her story.

I don’t remember how we started talking about her family, but the woman who I knew as a bright light of joy and grace had so much brewing just beneath the surface. Ms. Rachel holds down three jobs — one of which is maintenance work at Notre Dame. Yet between those three jobs and taking care of her precious son, she finds herself hopelessly adrift in a world. Her God-given, American-raised “freedom” has continued to leave her more isolated and restrained.

Political Liberalism, born of the Enlightenment with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law is in crisis. Birth rates are declining. Communities are becoming less connected. Right-wing populist revolts are fermenting in liberal democracies around the world: across the pond by Brexit in 2016, victories in Italy, Hungary and Poland, from AMLO in Mexico to all across South America. January 6th and Trump are not the reason liberal democracy is dying. They are a symptom of the fever to come. Ms. Rachel’s life story is a similar symptom of a system in decline. 

Liberalism, in its current form, is dying.  It’s dying because it has been co-opted by the very people who claim to be its biggest defenders; the only way to save it is through resurrection. 

Liberalism has become a shell of itself. Samuel Moyn, a Yale law and history Professor, recently released a book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” Moyn argues that classical liberal intellectuals during the Cold War re-scaffolded the tradition, because of fears of totalitarianism, into a project that lost its emancipatory and perfectionist roots.  

Moyn has created entire areas of study in history. His previous books like “Christian Human Rights” shed light on how discourses on human rights had been captured by conservative Christians in the early part of the 20th century. His recent “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War” argued attempting to make war more humane has made it endless. His newest book similarly attempts to problematize the history of an idea and how it’s impacting the world today.

Moyn’s newest book is an empathetic yet crushing indictment of the most fervent defenders of liberalism. They’re the very people killing it. Moyn depicts how, in the aftermath of the massive bloodshed of World War II, it’s no wonder that “expectant hope now felt naive, and the aspiration to universal freedom and equality was denounced as a pretext for repression and violence.”

To illustrate how at this particular moment in time, Cold War liberals transformed the tradition, he follows a cast of six unlikely bedfellows. Moyn delves into the thoughts of Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. This collection of thinkers embraced pessimism and fatalism to shrink liberalism for a far less radical project of Cold War Liberalism.

Liberalism, like Ms. Rachel, can’t take a sick day. As a malleable idea throughout history, the conditions, politicians and philosophers bent liberalism as it sickened, bent liberalism away from original goals built on emancipation and political rights, bent liberalism to the point where it might break.

In many ways, the Enlightenment was the intellectual creator of liberalism and the world we’ve inherited, an emancipatory era that was preceded by the Scientific Revolution and began during the French Revolution. Also known as the Age of Reason, it marked the ascendance of ideals built on liberty, progress and happiness.

The first chapter of Moyn’s book follows the journey of Judith Shklar whose work exposes liberalism’s greatest defenders and transformers deviate from their Enlightenment roots. Shklar, who was a Jewish refugee became a professor of political thought — specifically focusing on the Enlightenment. 

In Shklar’s first book “After Utopia,” Moyn points towards her radical critiques of Cold War liberalism. As many Cold War liberals essentially sought a type of regulated libertarianism, Shklar depicted how harmful it was to the liberal cause, “an early sign of the relinquishment of the Enlightenment itself — that liberals were redefining freedom away from ‘moral and intellectual self-fulfillment’ to the ‘absence of restraint.’”

Cold War liberals abandoned the ideal of emancipation in fear that it would lead to totalitarianism. As Moyn states, “It is both regrettable and revealing that, instead of opposing the claim of enemy communists to inherit the Enlightenment by showing how opportunistic it was, Cold War liberals accepted communists’ claim and indicted the Enlightenment instead.” This is somewhat the journey of Shklar throughout the book, as she slowly accepts claims against the Enlightenment until she becomes a Cold War liberal herself.

It wasn’t only the Enlightenment that Cold War liberals sought to purge, but also the Romantic movement. Moyn describes how “the Romantic movement had been the prime source of modern perfectionism.” Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution that emphasized intense emotions and nature with a focus on perfectionism.

For this chapter he follows the journey of Isaiah Berlin, Shklar’s mentor and famed libertarian, as he helped in ripping Romantic idealism from the tradition. As Moyn argues, “his vice was that his bifurcation of freedom and his defense of the kind of state that could guarantee negative liberty cut him and his followers off politically from the Romantic liberalism for which he had made room in his cannon of the history of political thought” (60). Berlin still tried to rescue romanticism within liberalism but continually fought back against the perfectionism that was part of romanticism.

The rest of the book follows people: Karl Popper shows how Cold War liberals renovated historicism out of liberalism. Gertrude Himmelfarb shows canonical sources within liberalism were replaced with a type of Judeo-Christian texts that based governance in eternal commitments. Hannah Arendt shows the Eurocentricity and racism engrained in the Cold War liberal project. And Lionel Trilling connects the political liberalism to the personal. 

The book goes into more detail on those thinkers and weaves them together. By the end of the book, Moyn shows how the system originally created to protect the political rights of its citizens has become co-opted to protect the freedoms of economic markets and those rigging the systems in their favor. Cold War liberalism and its predecessor neoliberalism is a bipartisan rot forming a singular uni-party built on the exploitation of the working class. This degradation was not inevitable and is not irreversible.

The same people who most despise former President Donald Trump are those who have the most to lose from liberalism’s undoing. Many of them are marginalized identity groups who have most benefited from the freedoms liberalism has brought: gay couples, communities of color, women and others whose rights have been expanded. However, equally important are those who gained significant unregulated rewards from the freedom of global economic markets while butchering the rest of the country. 

The anti-Trump coalition is a fragile one built between those who have historically been left out of the political process and those who have economically benefited most from historical systems of inequity. 

While not completely ironed out, Moyn offers a divergence on the problems of our current ideas on emancipation within liberalism. Moyn sees the struggles of people like Ms. Rachel as a problem born of free market neoliberalism that dreams too small in its ideas on welfare. 

For all the things I love about Moyn’s work, there are drawbacks and incomplete parts that need addressing. First, genealogical history, while persuasive, is incomplete. Moyn’s methodology for historical study begins with a problem he sees in the present and drills down until he hits the fracture point that has led to the problem he sees. This methodology can sometimes bend or distort narratives. More research and methodologies need to be applied to understanding this transformation of ideas.

Secondly, a large part of his argument discusses this evolution of Cold War liberalism to neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism but doesn’t necessarily provide context for what and how that happened. Of course, one book on that entire evolution would be too long. He also points to others “as interesting for some future historian of the 1990s is how Cold War liberalism, in its recapitulations, was revised in large and small ways.”

Moyn does a good job of hinting at the connection between Cold War liberalism and neoliberalism but does not fully provide the evidence for such a connection. Moyn stated “Both fans and foes of neoconservatism — and its alliances with neoliberalism — have routinely dated it to the crises of the 1960s. But an Actonian starting point led down a Cold War liberal slope into neoconservatism and neoliberalism alike.” 

Thirdly, there are characters and intellectuals that are paradigmatic Cold War liberals whom he did not include — most prominently Reinhold Nieuber. Would the argument change? I don’t think so, but there needs to be a broader analysis of Cold War intellectuals who were more influential than just the ones he picked.

In essence, Moyn offers a path of potential hope for those who still believe in liberal democracy. Moyn does not hope for post-Cold War liberalism to come back as it held “its own ambivalence toward a broader world project of freedom.” However, he seeks a recreation of an Enlightenment canon, a return to the perfectionism of Romanticism, a reworked belief in historicism and, in essence, a reborn liberalism. 

Liberalism is dying. It’s dying because the freedom given to people like Ms. Rachel is a falsified idea of freedom. The state has given up on dreaming of what welfare can look like and has eroded the pre-Cold War traditions that emblazoned the liberal project. Those who have rigged the economic system in their favor have sold out the working class through globalization.

William F. Buckley Jr., the “godfather of modern conservatism” popularized the saying: “Don’t let them immantize the eschaton!” This was his way of saying when people attempt to create heaven on Earth through emancipatory projects and welfare, it inherently leads to communism and gulags. Liberalism, instead of reframing, agreed. They continued to agree for decades — from Ronald Reagan determining the state as the enemy of freedom, Bill Clinton destroying welfare and the continuation of unjust warfare abroad — and decided to dream small. 

It’s time for defenders of liberal democracy to immanentize the eschaton. To bring heaven down to Earth. Ms. Rachel is going from job to job to job working 60 hours a week. She will give her son a more fruitful life, but at the expense of hers. That type of sacrifice is valiant, but it shouldn’t be the norm. The tax credits after COVID-19 lifted children out of poverty. The state still has the choice to make it easier for people like Ms. Rachel and create a system to rebuild people’s commitment to each other.

For every encounter with the cross, there is a story of resurrection. Cold War liberalism has encountered its cross. The question is what that resurrection will look like.

Dane Sherman is a junior at Notre Dame studying American Studies, peace studies, philosophy, and gender studies. Dane enjoys good company, good books, good food and talking about faith in public life. Outside of The Observer, Dane can be found exploring Erasmus books with friends, researching philosophy, with folks from Prism, reading NYTs op-eds from David Brooks/Ezra Klein/Michelle Goldberg or at the Purple Porch getting some food. Dane ALWAYS wants to chat and can be reached at @danesherm on twitter or lsherma2@nd.edu.