Thoughts on Liberalism, Scattered Like Dust in the Wind

Last winter, I read Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent (a substantial part of it, I think, on the fourteen hour train ride from Charlotte to New York City), and I found that its explanation of the contemporary crisis of liberalism both illuminated what vague intuitions I already had and pointed me in the direction of new thoughts and sources, which is exactly what a book of this sort should do. At any rate, here is Sandel's early description of liberalism:

“The political philosophy by which we live is a certain version of liberal political theory. Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to live, government should not affirm in law any particular version of the good life. Instead, it should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends. Since this liberalism asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends, the public life it informs might be called the procedural republic.”

-Michael J. Sandel. Democracy's Discontent. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1996. (4)

I want to return to what Sandel pits against the procedural republic later in the week. But for now I want to stick with liberalism. But the key point to notice from Sandel's description is the emphasis on government neutrality.

I've been reading through Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square, which is essentially an extended reflection on the rise of the Religious Right as a backlash against the attempt to remove ultimate values from the realm of public discourse. It is interesting that Neuhaus, in 1984, saw Marxism-Leninism as the system most likely to replace liberal democracy were the public square to be fully cleansed of transcendent references. The world has certainly changed since then. The American people, bourgeois as we are, rarely have the stomach for a sustained national moral discourse. Moral discourse, of course, is much easier among a group with homogeneous beliefs, and as liberal democracy's circles of inclusion expanded, things only got more difficult. (N.B.: these expansions are worth the sacrifice.)

But there are several possible overarching values for liberalism that are non-Marxist, non-religious, and ostensibly neutral. A libertarian, natural-rights standard for freedom is one, and equality is another. In fact, John McGowan, with whom I took a wonderful literature class in the spring of 2005, identifies equality as the essential feature of modern liberalism and defines conservatism as any opposition to full equality:

“Equality is the most complicated and contested of the primary liberal values—and I locate liberalism's other components in relation to its commitment to equality. . . . Conservatism is best characterized by its indifference or outright hostility to equality.”

-John McGowan. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

Although McGowan does have a few kind words to spare for prudential conservatism later on in the book, equality ends up being the benchmark. And I can respect that, although I have little trouble imagining situations in which an absolute commitment to equality is wrongly applied to a situation where inequality is real—Harrison Bergeron, anyone? But of course, that's not what liberalism is about. We are speaking of equality between persons. But is that the only relevant value? And what of libertarian liberalism?

More tomorrow, I suppose.