A Hopeful Way of Understanding American Anti-Liberalism
Explaining how the American experience predisposes us to a whipsaw effect in our path to a liberal society.
Perhaps you’re a young American who worries there won’t be enough guns in the future, or there will be too many abortions. If so, this essay is not for you.
This is for those who think quite the other way, concerned — horrified is probably more accurate — that we are on an inexorable slide into authoritarianism, illiberal-ism, violence, or what I call selfish moralism. If you are of that ilk, let me try to put a positive spin on what’s going on. It won’t be easy. I’m going to have to reverse-engineer, from my endpoint (one in which we’re ultimately on a good course), how it could be that we have insane mass shootings with no end in sight; a body politic that tells women what they must do with theirs; a government somehow catering to the minority; no genuine action against global warming; a violent insurrection without the leaders being punished. Wow this is a bad list. I better have something good.
The only explanation must be that it is our freedom — our extreme level of freedom — that can enable such a nightmare, creating a whipsaw effect of scary bouts of extremism bouncing back and forth with lurches into the future. Consider that we had liberal president Clinton, leading to yellowcake salesman Dick Cheney as chief executive, followed by our first black president, then our first from the newly formed Narcissist Autocrat party. Now don’t get me wrong… there are plenty of structural problems mixed in there too. My biggest concern is that we have outlived the 200-year stretch in which our Congress and Supreme Court could tolerate lifetime tenure. But it is our freedom at the root of the whipsaw. We are free to be stupid; free to form a violent mob, as long as it’s a white mob since most of our jurisprudence still uses the unamended Constitution; free to own as many guns as they can profit from… as long as Congress gets a cut; free to burn any amount of carbon without paying the true price to future generations… as long as Congress gets a cut; free to complain about outsiders taking our jobs while we can’t fill the jobs we have and the outsiders roast to death in trucks at our border.
Yes, I’m making an imperfect argument. But don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good; it’s still the best argument you’re going to hear. Yes, we need to fix some things in the Constitution, just as the founding fathers insisted we do… but they only insisted by example, not construct. They were amending it before the ink was dry.
We are on an inexorable path toward a more liberal society, toward ever-increasing ‘public goods’ that includes not just endless paving of roads, funding of big military, and a bottomless supply of guns… but of increasing healthcare, safe schools, and clean air. But the whipsaw will make it painful to watch.
