After Liberalism
The core principles of liberalism, freedom and equality, are not enough for the good life. They need to be supported by a thicker understanding of human nature and the good. By Alan S. Rome
Witnessing the world conflagration that was the French Revolution, the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre lamented that “if there is an incontestable maxim, it is that in all seditions, insurrections, and revolutions, the people always begin by being right, and always end by being wrong.” Faced with serious political crises, many contemporary elites have come to believe that the people do not just end by being wrong but begin so. The voice of the people is no longer to be listened to but controlled, corrected, channelled, or outright suppressed.
The postwar liberal consensus of some eighty years standing is currently breaking down. There is a general sense of malaise and of the crumbling of old certainties. Many have begun to question the viability of democracy in the modern age. Democracy has indeed always had its critics. The ancients considered it a weak and inherently unstable regime, hovering perilously between anarchy and tyranny, and prey to ignorance, demagoguery, and the excesses of passion. It was generally disdained until the Age of Revolutions in the late eighteenth century. John Adams could still warn in 1814: “remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” It was only over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it gained its respectable sheen of representative government and liberal constitutionalism.
Even so, critics continued to charge that it undermined the common good and human excellence by instituting the rule of mediocrity. The great observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville observed how democracies, in their overweening passion for equality, strive for formlessness, flattening all distinctions, all social ties and hierarchies—no matter how legitimate—into a uniform mass of individuals. Its contemporary critics argue that it leads to the tyranny of the majority, and is the tool of the selfish, the partisan, the wealthy, and the powerful. It cannot effectively deal with political externalities, with the rights of other peoples or of future generations, or with global challenges such as climate change. And, in developing countries, its introduction often exacerbates corruption, factionalism, and violence. Ultimately, it is more appropriate for small communities where decisions are made face to face than for the large, impersonal, bureaucratic complexes of modernity.
