The Growth of the Liberal Soul

Liberal democracy has been counted out more times than can be numbered. It is the worst of modern political forms—except for all the rest, to revive Churchill’s infamous quip. Yet the rumors of its demise, no matter how frequently mooted, have been greatly exaggerated. Of course, like all terminal patients it is always possible that the latest demurral may be the final one. We simply do not know, and therein lies liberalism’s great secret. Liberal democracy can neither fail nor die, for its endurance remains up to us. So long as we are the responsible ones, its resuscitation lies in our hands. We have become answerable for the question of its survival. To the extent that we have not turned our backs on the principle of liberty, its political evocation cannot turn its back on us. Dynasties may fail and ideologies may crumble but how can that which depends neither on a line of succession nor on historical destiny fail? So long as there are individuals who are convinced of the value of self-government there remains a foundation for freedom and dignity that can sustain an order based upon them. It is the one political form that depends solely on you and I for the underpinnings that make it work. For this reason we cannot talk about the collapse of liberalism, but about our failure to believe in what makes self-government worthwhile. Even the denial of liberty is premised on a faith in the liberty to render such judgements.

The passing storm clouds of illiberalism may suggest a shaking of convictions but only so long as we hold onto the illusion that any greater security ever existed. As the political form that is perennially in search of its own reaffirmation, liberal politics always seemed to rest on an aspiration that was never fully present. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” was always more of a prescription than a description. We simply forget that such is the imperative character of political language. It is constitutive of the reality we wish to attain rather than a statement of what it does obtain. This is why the objection that Jefferson and the Founders contradicted their own principles never renders the principles false. The men who signed the Declaration may have failed it, as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln variously declared, but that did not make the document itself a failure. Indeed the critique that overcame slavery turned on the inescapable weight of that collective realization of bad conscience. The men were false, but the document was true. Contrary to the suggestion that it only consisted of value judgements, it turned out to contain an inexorability that, as Jefferson intuited, would call down a judgement of God that could not finally be evaded. Something of that sense of self-contradiction is present in the intemperate mood that currently roils liberal political societies. Denunciations from the left and the right lay claim to a privilege of liberty that critics are quick to refuse to those against whom their invective is directed. It is not liberty that has been lost, but the possibility of humane conversation. The coarseness and bullying of such encounters are only the external manifestation of an erosion of respect that guards the deepest possibility for communication between persons. It is no accident that leading liberal theorists have made communicative action the bedrock for the larger political principles on which a system of ordered liberty could be erected. The liberty of each that is bound by the liberty of all, a mutual acknowledgement without further demonstration, is the air that a liberal democracy breathes. We only become intensely aware of it when the door plug fails and we gasp for what is no longer available. That is the moment when we reach for the oxygen masks we have been assured will fall down before us.

(excerpted from the introduction)