Last week in this space we sketched the case for a party of liberty. We noted that “one lesson of 2016 is that it’s time to worry about liberty again.” We asked whether partisans of liberty might be able to come together—”more likely informally than formally”—in its defense. We claimed the answer might be yes.
During the past week, we’ve heard from two schools of intelligent skeptics who doubt this claim.
The first—call them the populists—base their doubts on the hard political facts of 21st-century democracy. As one former congressman explained on television, voters are not moved by the argument for limited government. When push comes to shove, they want the politicians for whom they’ve voted to use the power of government to advance their interests.
So a party of liberty would have trouble getting any real purchase in a modern democratic electorate, in which all constituencies are used to imploring government to feel their pain and serve their wishes, and in which voters have grown accustomed to judging politicians by their success in responding to the voters’ (often short-term) desires. The democratic pull in our liberal democracy has overwhelmed the “liberal” modifier.
But there are democratic remedies to the diseases inherent in democratic government. Serious thinkers have given quite a bit of thought to this problem, and democratic statesmen have dealt with it. The doubters are correct that there’s no straight and narrow path to preserving and fostering liberty. Liberal democracy is something difficult to achieve, not merely a set of formulas to be defended nor a list of dogmas to be demonstrated.
But making arguments and creating institutions that lead people—often indirectly—to defend liberty surely isn’t impossible. Indeed, it has always been one of the core challenges of democratic statesmanship and democratic thought. Tocqueville discusses the ways modern democrats can be led from a concern with their narrow and immediate self-interest to a concern with their self-interest more broadly understood. He even suggests that self-interest well understood can point beyond itself, to a kind of concern for the whole. A Tocquevillian party of liberty may fail. But it is not, we think, doomed to fail.
Which brings us to the second school of skeptics, whom we can call the pessimists. They think liberty itself is a weak oak. Defending liberty is fine, they concede—but the real crisis of our time is the family, or community, or religion, or morality. A party of liberty can’t be the solution, because it is liberalism itself that’s the root of the problem. It’s precisely modern liberty that erodes the social institutions and personal mores, the social and moral capital, that are necessary to the flourishing of a liberal democracy.
This argument is a powerful one. It does mean a simple-minded focus on liberty by itself can’t be the solution. But family and religion aren’t going to be strengthened in a progressive nanny state or an authoritarian populist one. So figuring out how family and society can flourish, even how they can be rejuvenated, in an atmosphere of liberty is really the only political agenda that makes sense for those most concerned about rebuilding social and moral capital.
What all of this means is that it’s crucial for the partisans of liberty to have a perspective outside of and deeper than that of modern liberalism. Liberty will only be saved by those who have read—who have studied—its critics, both friendly and hostile. Indeed, one could say that the strength of liberal democracy is intimately related to the strength of liberal education—of an education that looks beyond contemporary prejudices, that is fully open to thinkers and statesmen of the past, that seeks to think through political questions in a way that truly enlightens, rather than bowing to the false gods of contemporary progressive “enlightenment.”
But in the end, one comes back to the practical task of defending liberty. How does one strengthen the institutions and mores of liberal democracy? How does one prove both the populists and the pessimists wrong? Not by assertions of libertarian dogmatism or traditionalist moralism. Rather, Tocqueville suggests that the habit of thinking about and acting in one’s self-interest truly well understood may be the only way “remaining to us to lead the human race by a long detour back to faith.” The road to liberty will undoubtedly require some significant detours. But no great journey has ever been accomplished without detours.
