there are common patterns that range vastly different geographies and political contexts, suggesting that this illiberal ascendance will be a defining feature of the 21st century.
…These are the three psychological planks on which all such movements rest…
…The restoration of a prouder, more wholesome, more coherent past…
…Collective grievance and a desire for national recognition
…a desire that politics reflect the dark realities of the present. That means: a recognition that enmity can be permanent, that bad actors cannot be transformed into good ones…
This sounds to me like the recipe for Nazism. Germans wanted to recover their pride, they felt a sense of collective grievance, and they saw permanent emnity all around (Jews, Russia, France, Britain).
Why is this now being felt,as the essay argues, in the U.S., Arab countries, European countries and Russia?
The author suggest a dynamic in which elites do not trust their populations and vice-versa. So the elites look to non-democratic means to enact policies, and the populations see this happening and rebel. In the U.S., we have courts and regulatory agencies. In Europe, they have the EU institutions.
The author suggests that the forces of liberalism, meaning something closer to classical liberalism, require someone who believes in liberal ideals and yet who also can connect with ordinary people. Whatever charitable you might say about President Obama, Winston Churchill he is not.
I gave that a hurried read. It seemed to me like he was trying to fit way too many phenomena into the same box. Bernie Sanders and Vladimir Putin are both signs of a new illiberalism?
The right wing, “xenophobic” reaction is real, and I don’t think it’s merely driven by racism and xenophobia. Peter Frost and Paul Collier have both written about hostility to immigration using ideas that seem to me to be analytically useful.
If there is anything that all the frustrated “illiberals” have in common, it has to do with a search for workable norms. Immigrants often bring new norms, and often don’t even know the local ones. If they are aggressive and self-confident, they might not seek to obey the old local norms. One method to preserve old norms is to keep new migrants out. When you allow the migrants, they bring their own norms.
Bernie supporters, as well, are in a quest for better norms–they either want the old norms back or they think they can initiate better norms.
We might put it like this: Economies need property rights and commercial codes. Societies need more than that–they need norms. in most societies norms aren’t enforced by laws–they are enforced by habits.
If people think that following the old norms has led them to be taken advantage of, they get illiberal. “Politics as usual” can’t defend old norms that worked in the past if lots of people won’t live up to them anymore.
I think it’s plausible that liberalism can be self-undermining. Isn’t the usual criticism of the utopian ‘rational social reconstructionists’ and socialist central planners that they do not sufficiently appreciate the role, function, and significance of the market or of social, cultural, historical, and biological endowments?
Likewise, classical liberals may not genuinely appreciate the preconditions for the emergence and maintenance of as liberal a social order as is realistically feasible. Those following the logical implications of classical liberal ideology will therefore seek to knock down various traditional prohibitions and ‘Chesterton fences’ and to resist any efforts to use the state apparatus to coercively preserve the enabling influence of various collective social conditions and restraining cultural institutions.
Doing so means that classical liberals, in their hubris and naivete, help to saw off the very branches they are standing on, eroding the foundations of the order they think they are trying to expand and perfect in obedience to their ideological principles.
In other words, liberalism may be a ‘constrained optimization’ problem with lots of dimensions and variables that interact in mysteries ways, and in which a sequence of short-sighted efforts to increase the value of one particular value at a time ends up leading one on a path that actually decreases the overall gestalt-level ‘absolute value’ of liberalism over time.
Indeed, there seems to be something like a ‘dialectical kernel’ of Classical Liberalism — superior though it be to Libertarianism — that, alas, leads to Liberalism’s unravelling.
Cf. ‘The Failure of Liberalism’ in Christopher Dawson’s ‘The Judgment of the Nations’ (written during WWII). For Dawson, Liberalism saw the ‘immense liberation of human energies’ but without direction or, shall we say, normative ballast.
https://books.google.com/books?id=hZ8q6qtvn0IC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=Christopher+Dawson+the+failure+of+Liberalism&source=bl&ots=AlxsKN6yeD&sig=762u1P3kqXy42Rs9lHE9bFSnKhU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiV3oK2ib3NAhUHw2MKHZV1BlIQ6AEIRDAG#v=onepage&q&f=false
For me, some of the most trenchant commentators on Classical Liberalism are, like Dawson, now long gone (in contradistinction to the Will Wilkinson’s and savants at Reason &c., who labor under the curious opinion that there is ‘more liberty’ now than ever) — those who really knew History and Economics, and had lived through great social transformation and crises.
Others of note — as I like to highlight here, on occasion — include the great Bertrand de Jouvenel, one of de Tocqueville’s most trenchant heirs.
http://textosdeinteresse.blogspot.com/2008/02/bertrand-de-jouvenels-melancholy.html
… as well as Wilhelm Roepke, who sought to subsume the economic wisdom of Von Mises and others to a wider moral framework (moving beyond what he lamented as mere ‘economism’).
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-18-number-2/wilhelm-roepke
I am currently studying linear optimization and the simplex method for work, so your metaphor strikes me as very clear and well put.
If I may rephrase what I think you are saying: I think the issue I have with libertarianism and progressivism (as a conservative) is that they have an overly simplistic “objective function”[1] which maximizes narrow attributes (“Freedom” or “Equality”) at the expense of the overall lived experience of people in a society (aka “Civilization”).
Furthermore, I question our ability to discover a universal “objective function” for maximizing this “lived experience”; not because I don’t think one exists (I think there are enough human universals and enough stability in human nature, even given the variations in culture) but that it would likely be too complex.
I think the best we can do is encourage and empower smaller polities to engage in uncontrolled experiment in different ways of “living life together” (idea stolen from Jim Manzi, among others). I think there is evidence of fertile ground for such ideas[2].
Or maybe I’m just xenophobic. Who knows?
P.S. – Handle, do you have a blog? I’d like to check it out if you are willing to share.
[1]For those who are not familiar, an objective function is something like GDP: it takes many different variables and tries to reduce them to a single value that you either want to maximize or minimize (under certain constraints).
[2]http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/06/united-kingdom-votes-localism/
I used to blog at handleshaus.com. But I now conduct myself mostly in private (for various reasons) and through comments on other peoples’ blogs. Mainly this one, because it is so excellent.
Thanks!
“This sounds to me like the recipe for Nazism.”
Godwin’s law…
“Liberalism” is losing because its a spent ideology. It’s entered the early stages of its own “cultural revolution”, where it tries to apply its logic to an absurd degree leading to absurd outcomes. When it receives feedback in the form of empirical results that say, “this is bad,” it either claims things aren’t so bad or claims that if it is bad we have to pursue it anyway because of some transcendental moral obligation.
Art often encapsulates a cultural essence better then any essay can. Liberalism is best expressed by the recent Gothard Base Tunnel opening. From wiki:
—
On 31 May 2016, a day ahead of the inauguration, the nine people who died during construction were commemorated in a ceremony at the north portal in Erstfeld that was led by a Catholic vicar general, a vicar of the Evangelical-Reformed Church of Uri, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim imam. A bronze memorial plaque with their names – four coming from Germany, three from Italy, and one from each of South Africa and Austria – was unveiled by AlpTransit Gotthard CEO Renzo Simoni.[15] A Catholic shrine to Saint Barbara, the patron of miners, stands inside the tunnel as a memorial.[60]
The tunnel was officially inaugurated on 1 June 2016.[61] At the northern entrance in Erstfeld, Swiss Federal President Johann Schneider-Ammann spoke of a “giant step for Switzerland but equally for our neighbours and the rest of the continent”, while a live relay carried a speech given by transport minister Doris Leuthard at the southern entrance in Bodio. The first journey carried hundreds of Swiss citizens who had won tickets in a draw, while the assembled guests in Erstfeld, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, attended an opening show featuring dancers, acrobats, singers and musicians celebrating Alpine culture and history.[60]
The inauguration ceremony, directed by Volker Hesse, generated some controversy.[62] It was described as out-of-place, weird,[63] or even satanic.[64][65]
—
Please watch the whole thing.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYKnfDQ7IMg&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0KsfP-Q2Zs&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVGEsYw9aJ8&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kKj0RcNdws&feature=youtu.be
Quote:
While it’s reasonable to wonder whether Europe’s elites are really, truly pushing some form of Satanic paganism, or if this is just an elaborate form of nihilistic trolling, ultimately it’s irrelevant. “Sure, I like to yell ‘Hail Satan’ at Christians, but I’m doing it ironically.” Ironic? Much more so than you can imagine…
Now jump back to last month. Having helped the Syrians liberate Palmyra from ISIS, Putin flew in a Russian concert orchestra to play in the Roman Theater and broadcast to the world a concert entitled “Praying for Palmyra.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b0hFIf4Zaw
The history, the imagery, is unmistakable. Western Civilization has re-opened a beachhead in Syria, and it’s Russia that made it happen.
How can an American, a Christian, and a lover of civilization, watch the Gotthard tunnel ceremony, then the concert in Palmyra…and NOT root for Putin to get the best of those degenerate European barbarians? I’m not sure this is really a rational reaction, but it’s a deeply felt one.
I hold no brief for Putin. Many of his actions are totally unjustifiable, particularly his practice of assassinating political opponents. He is not a friend of our Church. I am unimpressed with his posing shirtless while hunting.
But, almost uniquely among the current leaders of great nations, he does not hold his own countrymen in contempt. He encourages them to be fruitful and multiply; he passes laws to protect their children from homosexual propaganda, much of which comes from the West. While here in America being “conservative” has come to mean little more than trying to drag GDP up another tenth of a percentage point each fiscal quarter, Putin seems to realize that nations, like men, cannot live by bread alone.
As I say, Putin is not a virtuous man, and while I believe he has been very good for Russia, his sort of rule would be disastrous for America. But when the elites of this country do all they can to extinguish every vestige of the traditional culture that made America, you can forgive the beleaguered paleocons a wistful look towards Moscow now and again.
—
Of course it’s not just that globalists are personally degenerate. Their policies, especially immigration, are also economic, cultural, and social suicide. They will also eventually create an illiberal majority voting block, so the whole thing is self defeating. Then again, if liberalism is basically a hedonistic death cult, maybe liberals don’t care. People during the Cultural Revolution didn’t care if it was working or who it hurt. The intuitions one get viewing this art aren’t just a baseless emotional reaction, but an embodiment of the real world empirical disaster of liberal ideology and politics.
“elites do not trust their populations and vice-versa. So the elites look to non-democratic means to enact policies, and the populations see this happening and rebel.”
This is spot on. I somewhat shocked that Kling would acknowledge this and not suggest the obvious solution: revoke power from the elites. Move power away from these big elite central governments to smaller local decentralized government.
The only downside is that people want policies that may be considered illiberal. For example, the people of Japan want to remain a homogeneous mono-ethnic nation state, which is considered extremely xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and close minded. This is a weak downside and it’s far better than the alternative.
To convince the population of a “liberal” idea, this should be a bottom-up cultural change, not a top-down change imposed by some elite leader.
As von Mises observed, the Anglo-Saxon have manifestly tended toward the German pattern of socialism, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis. The Nazis had more than a little in common with the New Deal on the economic front. We can hope that the world avoids to sociopathic tendencies that the Nazis incorporated.
But the Interventionism has continued to creep up and went full-bore some 30 years after the start of WWII. The pushback of the Reagan years has been overwhelmed and we now have returned to trend.
On problem is the “elites” are still hoping to reach the Soviet pattern of socialism, international socialism, but socialism is incompatible with open borders and the welfare state, at least as long the populace believes in nation states.
“Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favour a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.
What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis, emerges.”
von Mises, Ludwig (2010-12-16). Planned Chaos (LvMI) (Kindle Locations 132-141). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition.
It is no surprise these occur during periods of depression when the economy sinks towards little more than zero sum. For being distrusting of elites, why are so few sent packing? Perhaps because outsiders aren’t as good at politics as insiders who often outplay them. Insiders stack the deck as much as possible. In the US we have Congress, elite central.
“The author suggests that the forces of liberalism, meaning something closer to classical liberalism, require someone who believes in liberal ideals and yet who also can connect with ordinary people.”
I think it requires elites that are willing to do a number of things. Some are obvious enough that societies reinvent them if necessary (leading from the front, e.g.). Some are less obvious but well known in Anglosphere history (e.g. consistently protecting some variant of political freedom of speech, like petitioning publicly for the redress of grievances without being destroyed for creating a hostile work environment or by a predictably coincidental series of formally unrelated tax and zoning rulings). Some are pretty obvious and effective but have the drawback that they’re hard to do reliably especially when you need trust the most (like imposing policies and enjoying luck that permit the society to flourish). Connecting with people is probably a plus, but I’m not sure it’s an explicit requirement, more something that comes naturally if you’re demonstrating trustworthiness and working closely with people.
I think elites haven’t cared deeply about public trust for a long time, and before that for some time they tended to take public trust for granted without fully appreciating the impact of institutions that had helped build it. All other things being equal, the elites seem to prefer to be trusted, but it’s like many jests and parables — some from economists, some from ordinary folk — about not meaningfully wanting something if you don’t want to pay for it.
Various old trust-reinforcing policies are so long dead that many people don’t even remember them, like open ballots, or like allowing private criminal prosecution even against agents of the state. Various others have shrunk significantly, like the extent of rule of law that can be understood and predicted, or the effectiveness of trial by jury. Various classic trust-eating institutions have been reinvented, like secret tribunals and empowering agencies of the state to confiscate stuff and keep the proceeds if they judge the subject guilty. Various trust-reinforcing mechanisms that remain are unpopular among the powerful and clearly not inviolate, so their days of effectiveness may be numbered: e.g., speech and publication that could affect an election, or getting onto the ballot (with the principle now pretty well established that the ruling party exempts itself from access requirements, claiming but not demonstrating that the access requirements are not unreasonably onerous). And public trust seems to be not much of a consideration in the formal policy or informal behavior response to some mostly-new issues, notably how electronic evidence is now so plentiful that there’s a flood of obvious cases of police and other official destruction of evidence, and vast indifference to prosecuting it, or to allowing effective remedies other than government arbitrarily choosing whether to prosecute it.
There are some less-heart-stirring but very useful trust-related advantages of the Anglosphere that have also been cheerfully abandoned, notably the regime paying its creditors, not only for war debts but especially for war debts, in hard currency instead of some fiat ersatz sham, and enjoying a deep pool of relatively-confident credit not only in war, but especially in war compared to the typical rival.
Various of those policy changes could be straightforward to formally or explicitly reverse, though of course they’d interact with changes in culture and technology and economics in unforeseeable ways, so some outcomes might be different than even a historically knowledgeable policymaker would guess. But at the moment there’s so nearly zero interest that some radical change would be needed before anyone in the elite cared to reverse them.
We also have what seems to be an unusual culture of drearily unimpressive elites, which I think damages trust in an informal but important way. It’s hard to estimate how much of a difference this makes when you want a fireteam or some other kind of team, but I’m fairly sure — both from intuitive psychology and from observation of historical societies which competed successfully — that it makes a difference. Most highly-effective cultures that I know of have some elite virtues that might be pretty useless but are at least difficult and difficult to fake, such as performing music or speaking Greek or hunting dangerous animals. To a considerable extent our society seems to have actively moved to the opposite and continues to move further, so that increasingly we anoint schlubs distinguished by their in-group connections, by their time-serving connection-gated credentials, and by their keen nose for in-group fashion, doctrine, and ritual purity. This doesn’t seem to be fixable with a simple formal policy change, but it might be fixable somehow, or might fix itself under different informal incentives. (Just less indifference to public trust would probably help.)
All this indifference to trust has actually been somewhat rational for a long time given the mostly-correct assessment that there were no rivals that would be an urgent threat. (Correct for the USA, somewhat correct for Britain, not so correct for some unfortunate imitators like France.) Where correct, it has worked to what seems to be the general satisfaction of powerful people for generations of power, and it’s not so easy to see how a serious rival could arise today, so it might keep working. But should some twist of fate spawn a worthy rival, there might be time for a modernized rerun of the classic lifecycle drama of a high-trust high-performance organization eating its fill, settling down to squander its trust and performance on self-indulgent decay toward despotism, and getting chewed up by one or more fresh higher-trust higher-performance organizations, sometimes humiliatingly smaller ones.
“elites do not trust their populations and vice-versa. So the elites look to non-democratic means to enact policies, and the populations see this happening and rebel.”
Maybe avoid the Nazism comparison here as, Trump and Brexit stuff is 10% of the Nazi or any 1930s Fascism movement. At this point Trump is still a cartoon version of even Mussolini and Brexit ranks something similar to Smoot-Hartley. Notice the low military spending in Europe as well so the movement is still based on basic internet comments. And it is not fair to include Putin’s Russia here as he was elected in response to the Soviet collapse and the nation has always been separated from Europe anyway.
Also, the basic Trump movement is the Pat Buchanan anti-global message that the political elite are weak against the economic elite that has used the global economy and illegal immigration to keep real wages down. And most Blue Collar positions have not had real wage increases since the early 1970s using CPI so we should not be surprised by the resentments.
And finally, with 5% unemployment and a retiring Boomer population, employers might have to start paying higher wages and dealing with unions.
Yeah, the fact that Trump is to the left of say not just 1996 Pat Buchanan, but even 1996 Bill Clinton in many ways, never seems to dawn on people. If that’s now considered Nazi-ism, then I’m not surprised the taboo has worn off.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/26/when-the-entire-democratic-party-was-lik
Liberalism didn’t realize that like all ideologies it wasn’t suppose to take itself too seriously. In trying to go reductio ad absurdum on its basic premises it’s entered clown world territory and proven its detractors worst fears true.
To be honest it is hard to where Trump stands on most issues as they change daily (or hourly?) and I do remember Clinton ran in 1996 right of Bush 1992 on most issues. (And notice how important stopping illegal immigration was in 1996 when it hardly stopped.)
Anyway, it was Clinton and passing NAFTA that ended the brief 20 year period that Democrats flirted most with anti-trade platforms.
“By sanctioning and censoring the wrong kinds of speech on Islam, immigration, and integration, European and American liberals only manage to turn the illiberals into folk heroes and martyrs voicing forbidden truths.”
Yes.
A big element is much of the Western elite (in particular) feels that the world is in a post-nationalist phase. Unfortunately for the elites, nations still “matter”, particularly to people who aren’t flying about the world routinely.
At the risk of being klunky, what you’re seeing is an “anti-anti-nationalist” reaction by more ordinary people, who are revolting at the pretensions and what appear to be the policy objectives of a post-nationalist elite.
Immigration is the big divide: if you’re a post-nationalist, you regard “free movement” as a basic human right, but if you’re a nationalist, you regard “policing the borders” and carefully allowing in only people who will help your country as a basic property of the nation-state, and no amount of moralizing and hectoring by elites will make nationalists accept that you have to allow vast numbers of difficult immigrants – many of whom seem to hate you – no matter how “deserving”.
“This sounds to me like the recipe for Nazism.”
Maybe. But it’s funny how the asymmetry of the ‘all slopes are slippery’ insight works in practice.
One often sees any movement in the direction of the popularity of nationalism equated with a path that leads toward Germany in ’36, but one rarely sees the same claim being made about socialism and Venezuela in ’16.