How liberalism became a dirty word in both progressive universities and right-wing politics, and what it will take to reclaim it.
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This month, John Dickerson talks with Adrian Wooldridge about his new book . Their conversation explores what liberalism really is at its core, how both the political left and right have drifted into illiberalism, and what ordinary citizens can do to restore faith in liberal principles and institutions. John Dickerson: What we’ve been discussing somewhat, is the ways in which people become illiberal, even though they think they’re champions of liberalism.
By which I mean not just progressivism, but conservatives as well. There’s the kind of choosing to be a liberal and then stumbling into it. Is that a useful way to think about it? Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely.
I think one of the most extraordinary things that’s happened to the United States in recent years is that this demonization of “liberalism” that I associate with, let’s say with Ronald Reagan—people saying “liberal, liberal, liberal,” in order to say liberals and namby-pamby people are against our values, that started out as a political strategy. And it was about gaining short-term power by demonizing a certain sort of people, but then they tended to be fairly patrician elites.
And the people who use those phrases—Reagan was a tolerant sort of person; George H. W. Bush was a patrician liberal, he was a liberal; George W. Bush was a liberal—they used this for strategic reasons, and they weren’t, in their personal conduct or in their politics, illiberal in any serious sense. But now there are a group of people around Trump who are not just opportunist critics of liberalism, they are philosophical critics of liberalism.
They think liberalism is destroying America because it’s gone so far—not just because it’s gone so far in the direction of libertarianism, but because liberalism by its very nature, according to Patrick Deneen, must go in the libertarian direction. It must become a philosophy that corrodes collective faith, collective beliefs, and becomes excessively individualistic.
So the road to the streets of San Francisco in recent years, where you’ve got drug addicts lying around and doing all of that is not an accident. It’s absolutely where liberalism must inevitably lead you. That’s what the post-liberals think. I think that’s profoundly wrong, but that’s their critique.
John Dickerson: And your argument is, we will just grab that there while it’s in front of us, is that there is actually a self-correcting nature to successful liberalism. And you identified in your book the various places it has taken place. Adrian Wooldridge: Yes, absolutely. I think of Patrick Deneen’s book.
In fact, the best arguments in Patrick Deneen’s book about the weaknesses of liberalism are stolen or borrowed from liberals themselves. The best critic of liberal individualism is Tocqueville in. He sees all the downsides of liberalism, but says that liberalism is self-correcting.
It’s allowed to correct itself because if it’s going too far in the individualist direction, it will summon up local government and the spirit of community and the spirit of voluntarism and the rest of it to correct itself. And I think that’s the most important thing about liberalism: that is a self-correcting mechanism that allows it when it goes too far—and it often goes too far—to correct itself.
I would also add that there isn’t such a self-correcting mechanism in populism. Populism doesn’t correct itself, and ends in a much worse disaster than liberalism has ever done. I think repeatedly, if you look at the history of liberalism, whenever it looks as though liberalism is about to die—and it certainly often looks like that today—it has revivified itself and sprung renewed from the velvet coffin. Thanks for signing up! You can
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