A Restatement: Liberalism Amidst the Modern Age

Only a politics of reclamation, a deeper and more ennobled commitment to a liberalism designed to mitigate and channel the immense energies of modernization appropriately and with a view to human-centered concerns, can vindicate the world in which we live. Anything else is an appeal to fantasy, duplicity, or a return to the very conditions which gave birth to the modern predicament.

Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

I would like to thank my friend and fellow intellectual sparring-partner Andre Chang for his recent response to my essay reflection on Liberalism for the 21st Century. Criticism is often hard for an author to hear, but when it is poignant and written with the degree of panache Mr. Chang has employed, it warrants a thorough reading as well as a further response. Disagreement in my view, when it is sharp and well-crafted, ought to be invited as a way of correcting and clarifying one’s own concepts—a truth of which I know Mr. Chang to be well-aware and yet strangely inclined to deny to others given his animus against liberalism. It is for this reason I wish to express my restatement and to articulate in more detail what Mr. Chang has misunderstood about my arguments and to identify some of his own flawed misconceptions. 

First, I wish to address and recognize what Mr. Chang has correctly identified—the existence of legitimate dissatisfaction and real human suffering present within the US today and the seeming inability, or perhaps unwillingness, of our leadership class to adequately address these problems. The crises in our present age include housing scarcity and unaffordability, a mounting debt crisis, the hallowing out of industrial communities, widespread alienation, cultural dislocation, and pervasive economic inequality. Though I take issue with his condemnation of immigration and temporary visas as a significant cause of these deep structural problems, Mr. Chang is nonetheless correct that America faces grave challenges both with regard to its economic situation and an even deeper cultural crisis of meaning. If these crises are both real and relevant, how can we claim, to borrow from Mr. Chang’s own language, that liberalism has “spoiled its own citizens into restlessness,” or from mine, “suffered from the success of its own prosperity”?

The appropriate response to this incisive criticism is that prosperity and poverty are capable of coexisting among different classes of people within society. Such was the case during the American Gilded Age, when “robber barons” such as the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers contributed in perplexing and seemingly contradictory ways to both the wealth and the poverty of the nation. These titans of industry contributed a great deal to society, building public infrastructure such as bridges and libraries, new research-based universities, and towering skyscrapers under their name. However, their wealth and power often remained concentrated, and much of the American working class was consigned to live in tenement slums, send their children to work in factories for pennies instead of sending them off to schools, and ingest foods unfit for human consumption as reported in Upton Sinclair’s now famous book The Jungle. Though there is some dispute regarding the exact level of economic inequality at this time, the Gilded Age has become known within American cultural consciousness as exemplifying the problems extreme wealth disparities can create. Indeed, the very concept of an age as “gilded” designates not wholesale poverty but an unequal dispersion of wealth, lending credence to the possible existence of a society both prosperous and impoverished depending upon one’s perspective. 

“In further contrast with Mr. Chang and the ‘new right,’ there can be no simple ‘return’ to a previous way of life that resolves in its entirety these deeply embedded modern problems. What we must seek instead is a form of liberalism capable of negotiating these competing psychological and sociological drives while at the same time fostering the creation of an animating and public-spirited political narrative.“

Today there exist new titans of industry, though their products are less industrial and mechanized as they are digital and computational. Digital technology, as stressed by political theorist Anton Barba-Kay in his recent work A Web of Our Own Making, is “both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others,” but it still has within it the same aim as previous industrial technologies—“to harness and master the elements.” The rapid growth of these new technology industries and their centralization into Silicon Valley have created a small oligarchy of individuals who have access to our medium networks for goods and information distribution. Though they must be credited for creating these new mediums, many of these technologists have also used their wealth and access to private information to manipulate our financial decisions and political perspectives. If history exhibits cycles, we have perhaps entered a new Gilded Age, one in which Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have joined the pantheon of modern barons, wielding exorbitant political influence through sheer capital accumulation, social media domination, and private data collection. 

It is for this reason that I find it immensely strange that Mr. Chang cannot reconcile the coincidence of both great wealth and poverty in America. Understanding the admixture of problems facing our country today, one is forced to see that both decadence and poverty are not merely capable of coexisting but are often mutually codependent when modernization is not appropriately managed. While America still boasts the world’s highest GDP per capita, many still cannot afford healthcare or rent. Though America remains by every comparative metric the wealthiest nation to have ever existed in history, there are many Americans still who remain trapped within cycles of poverty and have yet to be lifted up. Furthermore, while our culture consumes in abundance, many lack fulfillment, stability, and a sense of hope. 

The point being, there is indeed in America today a great wealth disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots,” despite the fact that our country has only become wealthier in its totality. We must recognize the positive truth that the median American today still lives a higher quality of life than any of the kings of yore, and few Americans would voluntarily choose to live at a different time or in a different place. Evidently, some of our current problems have emerged from the fact that this wealth has by no means been equally enjoyed, while others have appeared from existential questions arising from its excessive enjoyment. 

I believe Mr. Chang has thus crafted a very narrow and unnuanced narrative that cannot, by all appearances, recognize the duality of the current situation. He has elevated a mythology of decline (dogmatic within certain conservative circles) that in fact ignores the deeper roots of our present crisis. In his frustration with the current economic situation in America, one that is by no means insurmountable within our current political framework, Mr. Chang has elected to criticize the entire system of individual political rights and liberties since their incorporation under the 14th amendment. If he had merely intended to critique the cultural and moral relativism predominant within self-proclaimed progressive “Liberal” circles, he would not have written his response, since my article already addresses and denounces this dispositional attitude. In doing so, he astonishingly condemns not merely contemporary “neoliberalism” or “New Deal” liberalism but simply liberalism as such.

In his virulent denunciation of liberalism as creating “wreckage” and “atomized individuals” through its system of rights and privileges, one hardly knows whether Mr. Chang can at all be classified as a conservative in the American sense. Perhaps he can be conceived as one of the “new right” romantic traditionalists so currently pervasive among a young generation of MAGA Republicans, who in my previous article I addressed as deeply influenced by the thought leaders of the Conservative Revolution in Germany. Presumably Mr. Chang still supports some private freedoms given his willingness to engage in dialogue, though these are unspecified in his wholesale attack on liberalism. In fact, the only right Mr. Chang seems eager to defend in his written response is that of one supreme national right: “the American people possess not only the right but the duty to shape their own destinies in the pursuit of happiness for themselves and their posterity.” Here the right of “the people” to affirm its will clearly takes priority over the rights of individual human beings with their web of personal relations, private dreams, and aspirations to choose for themselves the “destiny” they wish to pursue. 

Here Mr. Chang has seemingly chosen to elevate democracy at the expense of liberalism, clearly to the detriment of our conjoined liberal-democratic commitment. Mr. Chang ought to be reminded that rule by plebiscite, or by the “general will” or will of the “volk” is not synonymous with freedom, but rather, it has repeated historical precedent with the formation of tyranny. Popular sovereignty and consent of the governed matters tremendously, but not at the expense of the more fundamental human freedoms we enjoy. Democracy too, as we are reminded by Alexis de Tocqueville, is capable of despotism. John Stuart Mill likewise warns us that an unrestrained popular sovereignty inevitably presents the danger of instituting a social tyranny of the majority. Republican self-government without free and self-governing individuals rapidly devolves into a vengeful mob rule. 

Mr. Chang has correctly pointed out that a “society that grounds itself on nothing more than individual autonomy and value pluralism will, by definition, struggle to articulate any higher vision of the good life.” One could legitimately ask why the priority of collective autonomy is any more or less alienating than that of the autonomy of individuals. Putting this question aside, however, I believe that this statement forms the basis of a devastating critique against a certain shape of liberalism, but again not against liberalism as such. This is a form of liberalism that attempts to ignore, celebrate, or even cultivate the problems latent in modernity rather than manage them as best we can. One example I pointed to when referencing the work of R. R. Reno in my initial article last month was that higher education has failed many young students by actively attempting to inculcate disenchantment, seeking to deconstruct meaningful worldviews and beliefs without doing the diligent work of reconstructing the desire for ethical order in a positive direction.

What then is the origin of the disenchantment that pervades the modern world? Here I wish to articulate that the problems Mr. Chang has identified have less to do with liberalism but rather have far more to do with the problems latent in the process of modernization itself. Ironically, his criticism in my view extends merely to a critique of liberalism and in fact does not go far enough. If he were to dig deeper into the current situation and grasp it in an even more radical manner, he would see that alienation is endemic to the development of technology itself—a mixed blessing in its promise to liberate humans from the desperation of nature yet also bind them to a process that as presently understood is no longer fully in human control. As such, we should not expect any political form of life to be capable of eliminating the alienation latent in this process but rather seek to uplift a form of politics we believe can best mitigate it. 

Thus, Mr. Chang radically mistakes liberalism as the cause of modern alienation rather than modernization itself, to which liberalism and all other modern political theories are merely a response. Furthermore, in identifying the flaws in his reasoning, I seek to demonstrate that grasping this problem by the root does not lend us to pronounce the failure of liberalism but to critique it in its present neoliberal form, one which has thus far proven itself insufficient in managing the modern predicament.

Modern alienation and disenchantment present a continuous challenge to a liberal politics that seeks to manage the problems latent in modernization rather than absolve us of them. For this reason, totalitarian alternatives to liberalism such as communism and fascism, as exposited in their most philosophical forms by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, remain attractive to disparate classes of disaffected modern individuals. They both speak presciently to the relevant grievances and anxieties that afflict different classes of people within modern society as a product of the modernization process and the growing power of technology. 

Marx speaks cogently in the Communist Manifesto of Mr. Chang’s concerns regarding the affliction of the working class, claiming that “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” as well as the sweeping away of all “ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions.” Capitalism in Marx’s view leads to instability, if we define instability as the deterioration of traditional ways of life. Marx, in typical revolutionary fashion, actually sees this as a good in so far as he believes it will lead to communism, a state that “abolishes eternal truths […] all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis.” Mr. Chang no doubt has read Marx and considers this view as abhorrent as do I. Where we clearly seem to diverge is that Mr. Chang asks us with Marx to revolt against liberalism in his belief that it causes modern alienation. Rather than Marx who asks us to seize and revolutionize further the means of production, Mr. Chang asks us rather to reverse liberalism and modernity by instituting a vague project of civic nationalism, one with the likely intent of attempting to compel Americans back into strict religious communities. I insist in contrast to both that we must instead work to humanize the modernization process, seeking to ameliorate these aforementioned externalities as best we can within a liberal framework.

Nietzsche by contrast believed that all forms of modern egalitarianism, including both liberalism and socialism, led to a lowering of humankind’s aspirations by reducing the problem of alienation to a problem of economics, either in the form of the capitalistic dedication to the maximization of wealth in the aggregate or by seeking an “equitable” redistribution of that wealth, or in the case of Marx, the ownership of the means of production. In his infamous and enigmatic literary work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche stresses that this economic view of man led necessarily to the creation of the “last man,” a creature who by reducing his desires to material consumption and comfortable self-preservation could no longer ask “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” Instead, such a person lives only for one’s “little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night” in a state of passive nihilism that has finally and ultimately rejected all deeper human longings and aspirations as irrational. In this sense Nietzsche extends and radicalizes further Marx’s animus against bourgeois life, declaring the last man to be the destination at the end of all egalitarian forms of modern politics. In their place, Nietzsche advocated for the creation of the Übermensch, an aristocratic being superior to all other human beings in so far as he has overcome moral conscience and ethical obligations for the sake of pure creativity and self-affirmation. This doctrine, known to us as the “will to power,” would become tremendously influential among various fascist ideologies in the early 20th century. 

While we in the West today must rightly recognize Nietzsche’s solution as bestial, we must also recognize that the problem of banality and meaninglessness is indeed an endemic problem afflicting modern life, one which is as serious as that of Marx’s conception of alienated labor. It is for this reason that Mr. Chang’s amazement at the problem of boredom I have identified reflects a lack of consideration as to the second half of our culture’s most frequent concerns. Whether we are low-wage managers or rich aesthetes amidst the present world, we are all subject to the same alienating process in so far as our lives are themselves subordinated to process, one with an unknown destination most of us will never live to see. Though we may still be fearful of totalitarianism from the warnings of Orwell’s 1984, we are and ought to be legitimately concerned about the sterility, hedonism, and lifelessness as expressed in Huxley’s Brave New World. In the first scenario, we must fear technological politics for its direct imposition of tyranny. In the second, we must fear not the power of direct domination but its seductive tendencies, our willingness to voluntarily consign our humanity to its machinations in the name of comfort and security. 

It would seem to me that we are not so much alienated by liberalism, nor necessarily even capitalism in the strict sense, but by modern technology itself—that in the process of humankind’s promethean attempt to wrestle and gain power over the Earth, thereby escaping the wretched condition of want and frailty known as the state of nature, humankind likewise found itself no longer master of the world that he himself brought about. Our age, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, has unleashed a process upon the Earth that, though an extension of ourselves, has at once made man into its own extension, an extension of the process itself hurdling into unknown paths and untraversed terrain. In the words of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in an essay titled What is Man?, modern man is faced with the “terrible fact that he is the father of demons whose master he could not become.” For Buber, both a rigid individualism and collectivism cultivate and fuel these demons rather than keeping them at bay. “Individualism,” he claims, “sees man only in relation to himself, but collectivism does not see man at all, it sees only ‘society.’ With the former man’s face is distorted, with the latter it is masked.” It seems to me that only a liberalism that avoids these extremities, negotiating between individual and social aspirations, can possibly lay claim to the path of the vital center. 

Some in our time have gone further still to declare that the human condition is fundamentally      alienation as a condition of our “freedom.” Such is the teaching of certain atheistic existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre whose writings became so culturally predominant in the West during the second half of the 20th century. This has always struck me as a remarkable claim; it seems to presuppose that our experience in the world must correspond with what we are fundamentally. It also devolves toward the wrong path of celebrating and cultivating alienation, a fact which may help explain why Sartre was later in life enamored by Marxism. I would thus correct this misguided assumption to say that alienation is our condition as presently situated, amidst the continuous change and cultural consumerism characteristic of the modern era by the imposition of technology.

Others, including Mr. Chang, will call me naive or duplicitous and choose to believe that I hold an unreflective or idealistic attitude towards liberalism. This would be a grave mistake, for I adamantly deny the possibility of liberalism resolving in any fundamental sense the problem of alienation Mr. Chang has cogently and with great ardor addressed. This is because I deny the possibility of any political solution to this problem. The crisis of modernity is not a crisis of having not realized an ideal nor of disappointment in its realization but of sensing ideality itself slipping away. What liberalism can do, however, is manage the aspirations for equal and superior recognition present in the concerns addressed by Marx and Nietzsche.  

This was the ultimate view of Francis Fukuyama in his controversial thesis The End of History and the Last Man. Frequently he has been misunderstood as a mere apologist for the neoliberal shape of politics that dominated American culture starting from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, but it is more accurate to say that his book represents a general defense of liberalism as such in the context of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The success of liberalism for Fukuyama depends upon a liberal politics that integrates basic economic concerns with “irrational forms of thymos as well.” Thymos, understood in the original Greek sense, can be understood as “spiritedness” or the fundamental aspect of the human personality that embodies more than material desire but strives for “esteem” or “social recognition.” Fukuyama stresses that these thymotic urges can take multiple, often contradictory forms but can be for the sake of categorization reduced to isothymia, the desire for equal recognition in the form of solidarity with a community, and megalothymia, the desire for superior and individual recognition of excellence. 

Sacrifice of the first leads to the creation of a society of strangers who live and work among one another but share nothing in common, having no common faith, fealty, or sense of interconnection or social belonging—the alienation addressed by Marx. Sacrifice of the second leads to the “contemptible last man,” to the cultivation of an ethos of contentment, mindless self-preservation, and mechanical reproduction over a commitment to genuine excellence, individuality, adventure, and purposeful life-affirmation—the alienation of Nietzsche. 

Contrary to those of the traditional American right, human beings are not asocial, economic individuals; and contrary to the doctrinaire left, nor are human beings by virtue of their sociality benign and perfectible creatures without passionate and aggressive longings for excellence. In further contrast with Mr. Chang and the “new right,” there can be no simple “return” to a previous way of life that resolves in its entirety these deeply embedded modern problems. What we must seek instead is a form of liberalism capable of negotiating these competing psychological and sociological drives while at the same time fostering the creation of an animating and public-spirited political narrative.

I suggest that the closest exemplar of such a narrative at our disposal is a revival of the spirit of classical progressivism in America. We must avoid with all our power the facile and virtue-signaling cultural progressivism characteristic of our most recent decades and return to the underlying ethos of a genuinely progress-oriented liberal politics that seeks to root out corruption, address working-class economic concerns, foster cultural excitement regarding scientific advancement and exploration, and in doing all of the above restore the lost sense of trust between American citizens and their government. 

Exemplified by such slogans as the New Deal, New Frontiers, the Great Society, and Abundance, we must stake for ourselves a politics of freedom defined in both economic and political terms, one that does not deny the ills intrinsic to the modern age but that nonetheless attempts to humanize our place within it. This new politics would not be reliant on orthodox Keynesianism or neoliberal free-market fanaticism but would seek to pursue an economic pragmatism that provides universal healthcare, creates effective public transportation and restores “third places,” promotes the creation of families and supports childcare, builds clean and effective nuclear and solar energies, resolves housing unaffordability by supplying more homes, and entertains the possibility of universal basic income amid AI and automation. This new form of liberal politics would also seek to remind us of the other positive side of modernity, the aspect that promises new horizons through science and exploration as we begin to chart new territories in space and within the coming decades send the first human beings to colonize other planets. 

Only a politics of reclamation, a deeper and more ennobled commitment to a liberalism designed to mitigate and channel the immense energies of modernization appropriately and with a view to human-centered concerns, can vindicate the world in which we live. Anything else is an appeal to fantasy, duplicity, or a return to the very conditions which gave birth to the modern predicament. Mr. Chang may at present shy away from this fact, but I hope that he may yet one day join us in embracing realism and the more ennobled form of liberalism it demands.

Noticeably this program does not make recommendations as to the fundamental purpose of modernity. This is because, as stated before, modernity is here and is not something fully under our control. As such, it would be delusional to make definite claims about the fate of the modern age. Questions about the “endpoint” of this incorrigible process must be set aside as unknown from our vantage, even perhaps unknowable. Nonetheless, it can be said that on that fate rests both our greatest hopes and fears, our spirited aspirations and deepest anxieties. Upon its course we must craft for ourselves a raft on which together we may live and reside, and this in definition is our fate both as a people adrift and as individual human beings who choose to live vitally amidst the throes of the modern age.