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About a year ago, I started publishing draft chapters of my book in progress, The Liberal Backbone. It hit me lately that the draft is done – I realized that with the latest chapters I’d started writing a second book. That one will be on alienation, which I think deserves a book of its own.
So I’m calling it. I’m going to switch to editing The Liberal Backbone — and, no doubt, editing some more, and then, more.
To make time for it, I’ll be cutting back on the frequency of podcast episodes for a while.
For this one, I want to sum up why I think it’s so crucially important for the lost liberal backbone to be restored. In a nutshell: the future of democracy depends on it.
It’s widely understood that our democracy is in danger. But there’s rampant confusion about why.
The conventional wisdom is that the traditional conflict between left and right has been taken to the extreme. And the solution lies somewhere in the middle: One or both of the two sides needs to become more moderate.
But the conventional wisdom is wrong.
Democracy is in danger because a growing number of people don’t believe in its left or its right..
As we’re taught in high school history, every modern democracy was founded on liberalism, the philosophy of freedom whose principles are summarized in America’s Declaration of Independence.
So, in a liberal democracy, it’s assumed that almost everyone is a liberal of some kind. The people commonly known as liberals are liberals of the left. The people known as conservatives are liberals of the right.
But the people driving the intense political strife we’re suffering now aren’t liberals of any kind. They belong to an anti-liberal right and an anti-liberal left.
The anti-liberal right is MAGA. In the media, MAGA is commonly described as very conservative, but in fact it’s anti-conservative, because it’s anti-liberal.
The anti-liberal left is what’s commonly called the woke left. There’s confusion about this, because the word “woke” has been given more than one meaning. But the woke left that’s been so influential lately is anti-liberal, like MAGA is, but for different reasons.
So the crucial conflict is not between the left and right of liberal democracy. It’s between people who do and don’t believe in the foundational ideas of liberal democracy.
Compared to that divide, the one between left and right hardly matters.
One of the best arguments for liberalism is its commitment to tolerance in the name of both freedom and progress. Tolerance spurs liberals to always seek common ground.
But what do you do if common ground can never be found, because common ground doesn’t exist?
MAGA doesn’t want to compromise with liberals, whether they’re of the left or the right. MAGA sees liberals as enemies of national greatness. It wants to utterly defeat them.
The woke left rejects liberal compromise too. It sees liberalism as a form of oppression, which must only be resisted.
And yet liberals of the right keep trying to compromise with MAGA. Instead they end up compromising their own, conservative liberal values. The same thing happens on the liberal left. Many of its members have adopted aspects of woke ideology, putting themselves in the impossible position of being liberal and anti-liberal at the same time.
Liberals should always be open to criticisms, including the ones coming from the MAGA right or the woke left.
But not endlessly.
Decades ago, the poet Robert Frost described a liberal as “a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.“ But he didn’t think that that’s the way liberals should be.
Being open doesn’t have to mean being empty. At a certain point even liberals have to choose what they stand for and stand up for it.
I hope The Liberal Backbone will help them do it.
Image: Signing of Declaration of Independence by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, via Wikimedia Commons.