Liberal Ideology is Not Enough to Save the West
In a recent column, New York Times writer David Brooks rightly recognizes that liberalism faces a crisis. He is concerned that Western democracies are losing “self-confidence and will,” and therefore are too weak to respond to threats from within and without. If liberalism is to “thrive again,” Brooks says, we have to make “the spiritual and civic case for our way of life.”
Liberalism, though, is an ideology – not a way of life. By elevating individualism to a ruling idea, liberals set about unloosing the complex knot of localized authorities that bind Western societies together. Brooks worries about the decline of “coherent moral communities” throughout the twentieth century, but he fails to acknowledge that this decline was the express purpose of liberalism from its outset. Ideology runs roughshod over the real rights of actual persons and particular places.
While Brooks correctly diagnoses many of the problems facing the world order, his commitment to liberalism therefore means he fails to prescribe real solutions. Liberalism simply is not enough to address the crisis of meaning afflicting the West. Instead of doubling down on a failing ideology, we must identify the substantive goods our civilization must secure, and then determine how they are to be conserved.
At the beginning of his column, Brooks quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a critic of liberalism who understood the civilizational struggle ahead of the West. But far from praising liberalism, Solzhenitsyn thought the West would have to abandon ideology to triumph over totalitarianism. In Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1978 Harvard commencement address Brooks cites, he took the liberal West to task for appeasing the Soviet Union. “The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals,” he thundered, “who refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes.”
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