The Reversals Of American Liberalism

One of my constant laments here over several years now is what I regard as the tragedy of the wholesale, lock-stock-and-barrel abandonment by liberals’ of the American core value — formerly a core liberal value as well — of colorblind neutrality, the principle that all individuals have a right to be treated without regard to their race, religion, or ethnicity.

I have also noted many times — here, here, and here are examples — that the non-discrimination principle is not the only core value, or formerly core value, that liberals have abandoned. For most of its career, for example, the very essence of liberalism was its commitment to free speech, and yet over the past generation the most significant efforts to place limits on speech — hate crime laws, campus speech codes, speech-as-harassment workplace speech restrictions, campaign finance laws — have come from liberals.

Now comes Lawrence Kaplan, writing in The New Republic, who argues in “Liberals For Scowcroft–And Against Liberalism” that the long-standing tension inside liberalism —

[t]he contradiction [that] pits the liberal ideal that discourages impinging on the autonomy of others against the liberal ideal that no people ought to be governed without their consent–and that liberals ought therefore to support the democratic aspirations of foreign peoples

— has finally, at least for the present, been resolved in favor of a full-throated, uncontradicted “realism” that has banished Wilsonian idealism from the party’s foreign policy ranks. It is hard, of course, to believe in exporting American principles if one has tossed overboard some of the more important ones, and, indeed, if one now regards principles themselves as somewhat suspect.

In any event, what we have now, Kaplan writes,

is a crude and cheap version of realism, which, although ostensibly a method of analysis that eschews ideology, is rapidly becoming an ideology of its own. Unfortunately, its key tenets as laid out by the Gary Harts and Paul Krugmans of this world–non-interference, narrowly defined vital interests, a foreign policy scrubbed of idealism–provide no adequate response to the war of ideas in which we’re presently engaged and will be long after the war in Iraq draws to a close. Nor do its proponents factor in the steep moral price bound to be exacted by trading in Woodrow Wilson for Brent Scowcroft.

So, liberals have abandoned their former commitment to race-neutral non-discrimination, to their (formerly) fundamental commitment to the virtual inviolability of free speech, and to idealism in international affairs.

What, then, is left of liberalism? I think the answer is: what was left of liberalism is now liberalism. In other (less alliterative) words, the always-contested border between liberalism and the left has now disappeared. There is less distance (if, indeed, there is any distance at all) between the center of the Democratic party and its most radical, left-wing components (and beyond) than, I believe, at any time in our history.