What's Wrong With Liberal Democracy?

And: Iryna Murder A Racist Act; Britain On The Brink; East & West; Man & Theosis

Liberal theorist William Galston

Here’s an important essay by the liberal democrat (and Democrat) Bill Galston, about the challenges facing liberal democracy in our time. Excerpts:

To resist this assault on liberal democracy effectively, the system’s defenders must embrace a rigorous realism about human nature and the course of human events. Rational self-interest does not always drive human events; the passions matter, and evil is real. Economics isn’t everything, or even the “base” of everything. Culture and religion have retained—and will not lose—their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action. Nor does history guarantee the victory of liberal democracy over its adversaries; nothing does, because it always remains possible to mobilize the dark side of our nature against efforts to create a better world. Human beings can, and often do, destroy what they have built. History has no side and no end.

More:

This requirement of liberal democracy often goes against the grain of natural sentiments. We want the public sphere to reflect what we find most valuable about our private commitments. Liberal democracy prevents us from fully translating our personal identities into our public lives as citizens. This is not always easy to bear. The quest for wholeness—for a political community or even a world that reflects our deepest commitments—is a deep yearning to which illiberal leaders can always appeal.

The fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—is no easier for many to accept. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree to incorporate competing views into public decisions? James Madison gives us the answer: In circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternatives to compromise are either inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.

I’ll get back to this in a second. But more:

This does not mean that liberalism is morally neutral. Liberals favor peace over war, plenty over penury, freedom over tyranny, and the rule of law over rule by decree. They embrace the moral equality of all human beings and the equal civic standing of all citizens. They believe that individuals enjoy a zone of immunity from state power. And they insist that consent, not coercion, is the basis for legitimate political authority.

Does this sound like “liberalism” in our time to you? It does not. What calls itself liberalism decades ago embraced illiberal identity politics, and embraced state (and non-state) coercion to implement their illiberal vision.

Galston turns to the problems of contemporary liberals, including:

• Myopic Materialism. “At the heart of culture is religion, whose persistent power liberals often underestimate.”

• Parochialism. “Many defenders of liberal democracy espouse some form of transnationalism, whether concrete (‘citizens of Europe’) or diffuse (the ‘international community,’ or even ‘citizens of the world’). From this perspective, national boundaries and loyalties are regarded as forms of irrationality. … These views, however sincere, are not widely shared. Transnationalism is the parochialism of elites.”

• Naivete. “Commitment to liberal democracy must be disentangled from faith in the inevitability of historical progress. Change is inevitable, but it can be for the worse and often is. Progress is possible, but it is neither inevitable nor irreversible. … The mistaken faith in historical progress goes hand in hand with psychological naivete. Most defenders of liberal democracy believe that some combination of reason and self-interest suffices to explain human behavior. This leaves out most of the sentiments that shape political life, including the dark passions—anger, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the lust for domination.”

Read it all. Galston offers a prescription for his fellow liberal democrats to go forward more realistically.

Now, I want to draw your attention to the excellent new Triggernometry podcast, in which historian Tom Holland, who has written deeply about both Christianity and Islam, joins the guys.

Holland explains that Christianity is the only religion that has a clear idea of the separation of the sacred and the secular. For Islam, for example, it’s all the same thing. Muhammad was a lawgiver. From the transcript:

TOM HOLLAND: I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a a secular mindset. And people don't want to admit that in a way because there's a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up. There's a kind of arrogance there that secular civilization of the secular civilization of the West is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it.

But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as as the civilization of the Christian West um and a very ancient one. And for most of its existence has been much much more powerful than the Christian world.

And therefore the idea that that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn't a given. So Muslims in in say in a country like Britain have freedom of religion. But there are lots of Muslims who do not see Islam as a religion because they see religion as a Christian category. Islam is much more than a religion. It's something that saturates every aspect of existence and therefore they don't necessarily want that. They want to they want to live in a a world where you know as as has traditionally been the case. Islam is everywhere.

But that is obviously something that the liberal state is not prepared to offer. So there are limits to what secularism and liberalism can and will offer.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So where's what's the obvious question is and, I mean it's probably unfair question to ask a historian, but where is this going?

TH: I don't know. I'm not I'm not a prophet unlike Muhammad. I mean my my guess is that that Islam, rather in the way that Judaism has done, will accommodate itself to the the host society. I mean, that's traditionally what happens, but that there will always be kickback because of what makes Islam distinctive. And also obviously the more Muslims there are the more weight their voices will have and so the more under pressure the the kind of the the secular assumptions of the west will come and I don't quite know I I don't know where that will go.

Co-host Francis Foster says that the worry the British people have is that the Islam present in that country will not moderate and accommodate itself to secular norms. And the more Muslims there are in UK society, the less pressure they will face to moderate.

Well. Labour MP Shabana Mahmood has just been named Home Secretary by PM Keir Starmer, meaning she is in charge of immigration policy and policing. Here she is earlier at a “globalize the intifada” protest in the UK. It’s hard to predict exactly where the UK is going, but the signs are not encouraging.