Have We Reached the Limits of Liberalism?

Liberalism
John Locke, a father of liberalism.

I published this in Epoch Times and wanted to share it with you all here, too. Looking forward to your comments!


Liberal elites delight in showing tolerance for things their neighbours cannot stand. Liberalism demands embrace where many people, by nature, might recoil.

However, even committed classical liberals and libertarians find some things beyond the pale, but they have lost the language to say why. Consider three examples.

The Halton District School Board ruled recently that an Oakville shop teacher be allowed to continue wearing his “large prosthetic breasts in class.” Dimensions aside, choice of attire necessarily falls outside the liberal ethos.

CBC Kids News, the “daily news service for kids in Canada,” made special mention last week of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s upcoming guest appearance on Canada’s Drag Race, another first for Canada. Trudeau’s appearance on a drag show is news enough; making sure kids know about it adds another twist. Nonetheless, liberalism has nothing to say about normalizing drag.

Last, consider the increased attention devoted to gender transition. We have a “no questions asked” approach with gender-affirming care. Some classical liberals raise alarms about children, but gender transition also falls outside liberalism. If therapy exists, then allowing transition is simply a debate about funding allocation.

Dress codes, drag, and transgenderism push the limits of liberal philosophy. These cannot be dismissed as aberrations of illiberal or progressive ideology. They are the logical outcome of liberalism itself.

American philosopher Tristram Engelhardt wrote that “Bioethics is a plural noun.”  In “The Foundations of Bioethics,” Engelhardt argued we live in a world with many ethical systems. The Kantian pursuit of a canonical morality has failed: Reason alone cannot dictate dress codes or drag.

Liberalism thrived for several hundred years without an explicit canonical morality. It did so by sneaking in a Judeo-Christian ethic on the sly: A noble lie to keep the plebs at bay. But postmodernity exposed the ruse and rejected the insertion of morals without consent. No metanarratives allowed.

The brilliance of liberalism lies in being a thin philosophy. It is modest. Francis Fukuyama, well-known philosopher of liberalism, offers a simple definition in his latest book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Liberalism is individualist, egalitarian, universalist (true for all), and melioristic (progresses toward an easier life).

Fukuyama dilates on “liberal institutions that have come under attack.” These “include the courts and justice system, non-partisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances.” He provides a long list of liberal blessings including private property, contract enforcement, (charter) rights, and many others besides.

However, liberalism cannot take credit for all that. Most “liberal institutions” predate liberalism—ancient roots out of which liberalism grew, not the other way around. No question, courts, private property, contracts, and families flourish under a canopy of liberal policy. But liberalism did not create these vital social elements on its own.

In 1955, William F. Buckley wrote that a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history yelling, Stop.” Today, classical liberals are yelling: Your prosthetics are outrageous. You cannot make me endorse drag. I refuse to call a boy a girl.

Frustrated liberals express a sentiment outside of liberalism itself. The sentiment falls beyond liberal philosophy.

Beauchamp and Childress wrote the first edition of their bible of biomedical ethics, “Principles of Bioethics,” in 1979. In it, they appealed to a “common morality,” without seeing any need to define or expand the concept. By 2019, their eighth edition struggled to find language for a concept liberalism forgot.

The search for language to express a sentiment is not new. Edmund Burke called it prejudice. A positive connotation of “prejudice” has died, but the concept survives in public life. It remains in the reflexes we use to solve innumerable problems. Consider going to work:

Am I expected to pass the stopped truck or wait?

Should I feel obliged to hold the elevator?

Was it rude for the secretary to not say hello?

Is it odd that the shop teacher wears “large prosthetic breasts?”

We find ourselves in a new, post-liberal era without words or signposts to guide us.

Although American political philosopher Patrick Deneen popularized the label in 2018 with his book “Why Liberalism Failed,” he only echoed what many others had been saying; for example, Philip Blond with “Red Tory” in 2010, and John Gray with “Enlightenment’s Wake” in 1995.

In “The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future,” British philosopher John Milbank, a pioneer in post-liberal thought, jumps to say post-liberal is not anti-liberal. We are simply in a new era of rediscovery. Moving forward requires language relevant to our time.

Until now, liberalism avoided on principle any meaningful comment on things such as dress codes, drag, and transgenderism. Liberalism relied on social consensus—a common morality, if you will—to guide behaviour. That consensus no longer exists. Popular theories such as woke ideology; equity, diversity, and inclusion; or critical theories rush to define a contemporary consensus. They offer new, illiberal ways of saying, “You just shouldn’t do that.”

Liberals face a stark choice. We can admit the limits of liberalism and start reinventing language to express social consensus, or we can allow a new consensus to be defined by illiberal reformers. Liberal tolerance fails without a shared sense of limits. Perhaps, it is time for liberals to pivot.

 

Are We All Liberals Now or Has Liberalism Ended?

liberalism
Who are we? Is liberalism finished? (See photo credit below)

For some reason, physicians love this line:

“I am socially liberal but fiscally conservative.”

It sounds moderate, prudential, even sophisticated.

Socially liberal” suggests individual choice about sex, marriage, and life in general. “Fiscally conservative” suggests spending restraint and market freedom.

Both statements come from the same philosophy. The first is social liberalism, the second economic liberalism.

In other words, “I am socially liberal but fiscally conservative,” is simply liberalism through and through.

What then do we mean by ‘liberalism’?

Liberalism

Liberal just means freedom. Most people like freedom, at least for themselves.

Libertarians make a whole political philosophy out of freedom: for example, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff – A Libertarian Manifesto.

Liberalism, on the other hand, means something more.

Francis Fukuyama is perhaps the most well-known expert on liberalism. At the end of the Cold War, he wrote, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

Fukuyama predicted a future of liberalism without contest or equal. No more socialism, conservatism, or anything else. Nothing but liberalism forever and ever.

Given the lack of competition, Fukuyama did not need to define liberalism against its enemies. Everyone knew what he meant.

Anti-Liberalism

Fukuyama’s endless future lasted two decades. The liberal consensus is dead, and liberalism faces attack from all sides. Continue reading “Are We All Liberals Now or Has Liberalism Ended?”

Happy Canada Day! … As Long As We Can Keep It

Happy Canada Day
Parliament Hill winter 2022

There are two kinds of citizens.

The first will fight for neighbours. If attacked, these citizens lay down life for family, community, and flag. Whether new citizens or old, these people think ancestors and descendants matter more than one’s own short life.

The second sees citizenship as a system of rights and privileges afforded by the state. Some may fight to protect such a system. But given external threat or possible collapse, these citizens would sooner run away to a system better suited to their needs.

The first sees Canada more like a giant, extended family. The second sees Canada more like a bureaucracy. The first feels a mutual bond with neighbours that transcends time and space. The second shares access to something owned by the state.

The first grieves at a politics of division. The second sees division as an inevitable outcome of atomized individuals served by big government. Canada is a bureaucracy: a gigantic soup kitchen. No ethos. No fabric. Just an efficient machine delivering tax-funded services.

The first citizens share ideas about what is good, true, and beautiful, starting with the country they share in common. A good country is not perfect, but it is worth defending. The second shares only the notion that Canada must change before it can be good.

Note: This has nothing to do with your country of origin or how long you’ve been in Canada. Each type of citizen can come from any kind of background: young, old, new Canadian, or old Canadian.

Happy Canada Day!

If you celebrate Canada Day, and I hope you do, know that you take a counter-cultural stand.

Celebration of nation — home, people, heritage — is an anachronism. Offensive to many. Out of touch at best. If this becomes majority opinion, you have no country, no nation.

In this sense, Prime Minister Trudeau thinks Canada ended long ago. The New York Times Magazine interviewed Trudeau in 2015.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canadians’ shared values make “us the first post-national state.”

What kind of citizens fill Canada today?

Are we more of the first kind, like the ones who fought world wars?

Or are we the second kind: citizens of Trudeau’s post-national state?

The End of the West

We stand at a crossroads in Western civilization.

COVID did not just show us how unprepared we were to face a pandemic. It showed us the state of our social fabric, our lack of institutional capacity, the fragmentation of what it means to be a citizen.

A nation has always been more than what politicians and pundits say it is. As we exit the pandemic, how we respond will show whether Canada still exists. Is Canada still alive, in the old sense of something we would die to save? Or is the old sense gone, and Canada is now something new?

We shall see. In the meantime,

Happy Canada Day! … as long we can keep it.