Macron. So this is liberalism’s great hope? Macron, and hopes for a return of Tony Blair to lead a centre party of moderates against the extremes of left and right that are gathering to destroy the perfectly functioning liberal order? I wonder where these people think the wars, the terrorism, the inequality, the divisions and injustices not to mention the planetary unravelling all come from: from anyone but them, of course. The appeal to the moderate middle always works for those who have no idea how the world operates, just want the problems that worry them to go away. The extremes are actually highlighting failures, seeking the resolution of discord and division, not creating them. Not all extremes are in the business of merely exploiting problems to certain advantage. Sometimes, people raising objections have a point. But people who want a quiet life don't like it.
How many times will people who claim to be “beyond left and right” keep falling for the appeal of this moderate muddle ground? For so long as the bourgeois mind is with us, of course.
In the Grundrisse Marx noted the way in which the "bourgeois mind" could conceive only two alternatives: when not imagining that the present stage of development, the stage of free competition, is the highest stage any civilisation could reach, the veritable 'end of history,' the more sensitive bourgeois souls, worrying that events may not be quite as splendid as its apologists claim, express a yearning to return to some simpler, more natural, pre-modern form. ‘The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end,’ writes Marx (1973: 162-163).
Well, the end is near for liberal society, and its modes of thought are very far from blessed. But the bourgeois mind has at least found the wit and imagination from somewhere to add a third alternative to its false antitheses – a constant yearning for a centre ground that liberalism has done more than any other political philosophy to subvert, hollow out, and destroy. There is something of a myth expressed by some on the left in politics that liberalism is merely a misguided and somewhat timid friend, that liberals are really the friends of the left and can, with a little friendly persuasion and cajoling, be won over to truly radical platforms. Try it. The truth is that liberalism is systematically and vociferously opposed to any attempt to reconstitute selfhood and sociality in other than individualistic liberal forms. Liberals appear radical when aiming their acidic and atomizing ethos against conservative forms of collectivism, think traditional moral positions here, and that is how they retain their apparently emancipatory profile in the contemporary world. Challenge liberalism with an assertion of the commons and substantive goods from the left, and the response is every bit as vituperative. The claim that socialism is totalitarian is made on impeccably liberal premises.
Power is best preserved by being concealed. And I am now past being tired and tolerant of "moderate" "centrists" whose "values" are a mere mask for dominant power. Nietzsche called liberals out on their hypocrisy here a century or more ago, and Rousseau another century further back. Liberals are implicated in a social order of violence, oppression, and inequality, even as they expect us to take their self-image and self-identity at face value - liberals love 'all people' and believe in all good things for 'all people,' or some other similarly vacuous slogan. In keeping with liberalism's central figure of the abstract individual, the only commonality it can envisage is an abstraction or hypostatization. It is easy to love all humankind in the abstract, since it avoids actually doing anything concrete for real individuals subject to the tyranny and violence of institutional and systemic power. Within liberalism's Inferno of abstraction, there are no real moral voices, just a cacophony of self-cancelling subjective choices, with victory going to those with most power. Sophism, in other words.
I'll call the conventional political sphere out for what it is - a liberalism of the right (a commitment to free markets and free trade which divides societies within themselves and sets nations against each other) fighting with a liberalism of the left (a top down technocratic government allied to a cultural and ethical relativism which unravels social bonds and moral commitments) - and all in increasing remove from the sources of meaning and life, all that gives human beings as social and moral beings the sense of identity, belonging and meaning. It's a hollow order based on a false prospectus, and the emptiness is increasingly apparent, hence the recourse to force. It’s contentious, I know, but in truth we’ve been tracing the contours of this denouement for the past century. This is where it ends.
Patrick Deneen presents a powerful critique of liberalism from a conservative position:
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
In this book, Deneen challenges the dominant political culture and its limited left-right division. This division, he argues, is no real division and merely involves two wings of the same liberalism. We are thus forced in politics with having to take sides between a liberalism of the right and a liberalism of the left. The liberalism of the right is committed to free markets and free trade, deregulation and privatisation. The result of these policies has been to divide societies within through record levels of inequality, as well as embed systemic injustices on a global scale. Pitted against this is the liberalism of the left, committed to top-down state regulation and technocratic intervention, accompanied by an ethical and cultural relativism which has unravelled the old social and ethical ties that once moored the individual and gave communities a secure scale of values by which to organize and orient their existence.
We are thus presented with a libertarianism of the right and a libertarianism of the left and are expected to choose one over against the other. It's no choice at all, not for those who subscribe to a virtue ethics.
As Alasdair MacIntyre argues:
“Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.”
We are all liberals now. Liberalism shorn of its metaphysical assumptions and origins is mere sophism and conventionalism. That's where we now are. As Weber pointed out long ago, ‘where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ This left-right conflict is a fight over shadows, mere ghosts. Those affirming substantive values, a true right and a true left, have no place in a politics so devoid of substantive conceptions of the good. And the emptiness is becoming all the more apparent. And so, faced with this impasse between the liberalisms of left and right, the liberals perceive an unoccupied "centre" ground and thus present themselves as offering a "new politics" that is "neither left nor right." Predictably, such a politics soon reduces to the existing institutions and relations of power, a variant of one of the competing liberalisms, and no alternative to either. It used to be called the "mixed economy" in the Social (parliamentary) Democracy of the UK. Top-down interventionism, public expenditure that did nothing to correct the contradictory dynamics of the capital economy, inviting a backlash in the form of economic deregulation. The frogmarch, death-march, of left-right, with pretensions of centrism along the way. Never underestimate the appeal of political evasion to the liberal mind.
Many may object to Deneen’s preference for religious communities to overcome this impasse, or to MacIntyre’s local communities of virtue, to Dreher’s Benedict Option, to environmentalists who want to form eco-communes, or to socialists, or to those who merely wish to reinvigorate the civic public, which is how I see J-L Melenchon, now on the receiving end of liberal state violence and repression. From a conservative perspective, Rod Dreher was clear that he took the Benedict Option out of knowledge that the issues which are of the profoundest concern to him would never get a proper hearing in the liberal public sphere. They didn't. I don't share Dreher's views here, but I see exactly why there was never any possibility of his being able to articulate those views. The neutral liberal sphere is a systematically demoralized terrain where no value has any place other than liberal values.
For all of their differences, these views I listed above all share a substantive notion of the good that is rejected by liberalism. For liberalism, there is no such good, only subjective choice and what is called “conflict pluralism.” That is the destruction of a true public. Liberalism merely leaves us with a legalistic domain that holds the ring between competing platforms: different groups fight it out and fight themselves to a standstill. Such freedom is not a creative self-actualization but a mutual self-cancellation, leaving only the most powerful still standing. It is a cheat and a lie – neutrality is just another word for liberalism, and this neutralised public sphere correlates, conveniently, with liberal institutions and values on choice and pluralism. The values enforced by law are liberal values, betraying a notion of the good that liberalism, committed to a neutral public sphere, denies that it holds. Behind that agnosticism on the good is a definite commitment to the liberal good, which it will impose by force of law and force of arms against those it considers enemies. Karl Popper wrote a famous book called The Open Society and its Enemies. The 'enemies' of the open society were Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. That pretty much renders all conservative and socialist critics of liberalism the enemies of freedom, then. How very tolerant! How very open! And how very revealing that liberalism is nowhere near as agnostic on the good as liberals claim it to be.
Time’s up on liberalism; I see it as a nakedly apologetic “philosophy,” a mask for self-interest, power, and a rationalization of asymmetrical social relations in which “justice is the interest of the strongest” (yes, that's Thrasymachus the sophist arguing against Plato, who affirmed the three transcendentals, the true, the good and the beautiful. I, too, affirm the three transcendentals).
This has been a long time coming, indicating a serious case of arrested development on the Left. C Wright Mills wrote this back in 1955:
As the administrative liberalism of the Thirties has been swallowed up by economic boom and military fright, the noisier political initiative has been seized by a small group of petty conservatives, which on the middle levels of power, has managed to set the tone of public life. Exploiting the American fright of the new international situation for their own purposes, these political primitives have attacked not only the ideas of the New and Fair Deals; they have attacked the history of those administrations, and the biographies of those who took part in them.
…
On the one hand, we have seen a decayed and frightened liberalism, and on the other hand, the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters.
C. Wright Mills
That quote comes from an essay of 1955, On Knowledge And Power, published in Dissent Magazine. Mills explains that liberals responded to the attacks of the political gangsters defensively and timidly, seeking to preserve the accomplishments of the New Deal. They sought only to defend the formal aspects of Civil Liberties, making no radical attempt to extend and entrench these liberties on new social fronts. They failed to exercise their Civil Liberties to call out the demagogues and the shouters of their day as the cowards and thugs they were. They were themselves cowards, and in time have now become thugs themselves. (This applies to both those exercising state power, and those involved in libertarian causes mobilizing mindless masses against all who express different platforms - all in the name of defending difference and diversity, of course).
In the famous closing pages of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre drew an analogy between the fall of Rome and the modern world with this difference, this time the barbarians are not at the gates trying to get in, they are inside the gates and have been ruling over us for some time. It is part of our predicament that so many fail to see this. You can find MacIntyre's famous passage here, I quote it often.
Mills again:
“The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”
Mills "Liberal Values in the Modern World," in Power , Politics and People (1963), p. 189.
Mills believed that the liberal model of society is subject to such internal contradictions and limitations as to render it incapable of constituting a conception of a substantive social good sustaining an overarching framework of society. Liberalism is, Mills contended, more of an ideology for the entrepreneurial middle class. That works only for so long as people keep buying the false prospectus of endless growth, however iniquitously distributed. When that endless accumulation hits the buffers, and the inequalities are intensified, then the mask of power falls off.
I'll say it plainly. Liberalism is a busted flush. I wrote an essay a couple of months ago with the provocative title “Liberal Society: Immoral and Lawless” – immoral in the first place, in that its agnosticism on the good betrays ethics to the functional imperatives of the world of money and power, and lawless in the last, an anarchy of the powerful in their predation upon the weak and powerless, at all levels of liberalism’s anti-social market society, a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, the Hobbesian “war of all against all.”
If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.
C Wright Mills, Foreword, The Marxists (1962).
I'll add a reference, too, to something else I wrote which is pertinent here: The Sick Society
I’ve been reading Nietzsche, who challenges the false ontology of liberalism at every key point. In Nietzsche contra Liberalism on Freedom (2009), Herman Siemens rightly contends that Nietzsche’s conception of freedom is antagonistic to the liberal conception in all fundamentals. (Siemens in Pearson 2009: 437-38). David Owen develops this antagonism between Nietzsche's thought and liberalism at length in his book Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995). The views expressed here confirm the fundamental critiques of the liberal ontology in the works of both conservatives and socialists alike, Burke, Rousseau, Marx for three.
The affirmation of the will-to-life is the thread connecting Nietzsche's The Gay Science of 1882, Zarathustra (1883 to 1885) and Ecce Homo in 1888. The corner-stone of Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati is presented here:
All questions of politics, the ordering of society, education have been falsified down to their foundations because the most injurious men have been taken for great men - because contempt has been taught for the 'little' things, which is to say for the fundamental affairs of life . . .
Now, when I compare myself with the men who have hitherto been honoured as pre-eminent men the distinction is palpable. I do not count these supposed 'pre-eminent men' as belonging to mankind at all — to me they are the refuse of mankind, abortive offspring of sickness, and revengeful instincts: they are nothing but pernicious, fundamentally incurable monsters who take revenge on life. .. My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.
Nietzsche EH, pp. 67-8
As I say, liberal impotence or ressentiment, liberal values as masks for power, and liberal violence as a revenge against a recalcitrant reality and recalcitrant others who refuse to bend to liberal fantasies.
The graphic is the front cover of a book that critically examines "just liberal violence": forms of direct and structural violence that others may be "justly" subjected to.
Michael Neu, Just Liberal Violence: Sweatshops, Torture, War
Part of the series Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society
Publication Date: Nov 2017
Michael Neu focuses on liberal defences of torture, war and sweatshop labour, respectively, and argues that each of these defences fails and that all of them fail for similar reasons. But he notes that liberals makes these defences all the same.
Liberal defences of violence share several blind spots, and it is the task of this book to reveal them. Neu offers a unifying perspective that reveals the three kinds of defence of violence under investigation as being essentially one of a kind. He demonstrates that each of these defences suffers from serious and irreparable intellectual defects and articulates these defects in a synthesised critique. The book goes on to accuse liberal defenders of being complicit in contemporary structures and practices of violence, and highlights the implications of this argument for moral and political philosophers who spend their professional lives thinking about morality and politics.
For reasons given above, I think the question of liberal violence goes beyond defence and apology, and points to complicity in the strongest sense – liberals are implicated in institutional and systemic violence and tyranny of the present order precisely because that “order” is liberal to the core. As Patrick Deneen argues in his book Why Liberalism Failed (2018), liberalism is the dominant moral and political philosophy of the modern age, pervading the entire institutional framework and social infrastructure. It follows that the problems of this world are problems of the liberal worldview, not the vestiges of other moralities or representatives of other political traditions, conservative or socialist (or the myriad nationalisms, fundamentalisms, and totalitarianisms that are springing up like maggots in the rotting flesh of liberalism) for that matter.