Liberalism in the end times [View all]

[Celerity]

In an age of populist revolution and radical upheaval, can the centre left do anything more than survive?

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/liberalism/71221/liberalism-in-the-end-times

https://archive.ph/hM95P



Late in life, the 18th-century French liberal thinker Abbé Sieyès was asked what he had done during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He replied, “I survived it.” Reflecting on Sieyès, Michael Ignatieff counsels that it is through survival that liberals can withstand revolutionary times. They need to work hard to remain politically relevant, so that once the revolution has run its course (if they are lucky enough to have survived it), they can try to preserve what revolutions have achieved and to restore what they have destroyed.

Ignatieff’s comments are relevant not only because he is the acclaimed biographer of Isaiah Berlin and a former leader of the Canadian Liberal party, but also because he is someone who understands 21st-century illiberalism first hand. Ignatieff was the rector and president of the Central European University at the very moment when Viktor Orbán expelled it from Hungary in a political act that signalled the arrival of the postliberal age. Now that we are in that post-liberal age, does it mean the populists will inherit the Earth?

In less than a year, the United States has not only ceased to be the guardian of the postwar liberal order, but turned into its chief antagonist. The effect of the US “changing sides” in international politics is so consequential that it might be compared only to the impact of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Trumpian revolution has changed the identity of almost all political players. At the same time, the symptoms of a populist handover can be seen in many corners of the world. The questions, then, are: what choices do centre-left liberals have when coming to power in a postliberal world? How should they shape their new political identity?

The customary answer is that liberals must be the defenders of democracy, decency and common sense—they should frame politics as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, sanity and insanity, competence and catastrophe. That strategy sounds noble, but it hasn’t worked particularly well. The expectation that populist governments would vitiate themselves through their own carelessness and extremism proved wrong. The record shows that it is more difficult for populist parties to come to power for the first time than to return to office.

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