Liberalism: Its own worst enemy
by George Jonas
National Post
July 26, 2008
Robert Kagan's fine study, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, had me persuaded before I turned a page. I've never been a dreamer, and had reservations about the significance of the Soviet Union's collapse even during the euphoric days of "the end of history." It was unlikely, I wrote in 1994, that the defeat of Nazism and communism would signal the end of the totalitarian impulse in human beings.
Fascism and communism didn't come to us from Mars. As they hadn't been imposed on humanity by extraterrestrial forces, they had to have been created by an impulse inherent in human beings. This being so, I wrote, we couldn't expect their demise to provide us with more than temporary relief.
Kagan's conclusion is similar. He expects dreams to end, history to continue and the struggle between "us" and "them" -- that is, between desirable and undesirable societies -- to resume as a clash between U. S.-EU-style democracies and Sino-Russian-style autocracies. That's certainly possible and bad enough. However, I find a worse development more likely.
Man proposes, God disposes. Man proposed the democratization of autocracies; God disposed the autocratization of democracies. Russia may have moved closer to America materially, but America has moved closer to Russia spiritually.
As Kagan notes, born-again autocracy masquerading as a respectable alternative to Western-style government is a dangerous ideological rival to liberal democracy. Any others? Well, there's militant, theocratic Islam, a self-evident rival since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Tribalism is another obvious rival, though probably self-limiting. Competing tribal doctrines might ignite cruel little wars, but lack the monolithic force of totalitarian ideologies. Actually, a European Union-type of techno-corporate state seems a greater threat to a free society. The EU's kind of supra-national bureaucracy, less bloody and more sophisticated than a communist state, is nearly as coercive and more likely to succeed.
I think the force with the greatest capacity for becoming a threat to liberal democracy is liberalism itself -- meaning loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological ménage à trios between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore, at once passionate and arid, that in Western societies has all but captured the educational and judicial machinery of the state. In some, it's a virtual state religion, whose matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police.
Some of loony-liberalism's ideological strands, e. g., feminism and environmentalism, transcend borders and religions. Like all successful ideologies, they can absorb other kinds of self-identifications and loyalties. They can even absorb each other, as demonstrated by the 1990s movement of "eco-feminism." As millennial ideas, they hold out the promise of a new beginning, a fundamental change in human society. Both matriarchy and environmentalism combine mysticism with a quasi-scientific stance, much like fascism and communism did. Based on partial truths, they're all the more dangerous for appealing not only to the worst but to the best side of our nature.
Environmentalism, especially, promises to unite us with the cosmos. It identifies the enemy as the masculine-humanist tradition of "biocide" -- a crime of which we're all guilty by virtue of being human. It's a faith, addressing itself to true believers, the very types who have a need to be ruled by something greater than themselves.
Until Kyoto, the nags Philogyny and Ecophilia ran neck-and-neck along the backstretch of the Despotism Sweepstakes, with Ecophilia leading by a nose. In today's post-Kyoto world, it leads by a length. Democracy, far from being eco-fascism's enemy, seems to be its friend. Its enemy is liberty. That's why I think liberty has as much to fear from democracy as from autocracy.
So, is it going to be Sino-Russian autocracy versus Western-style democracy, as Kagan suggests? I wouldn't rule it out. Nor would I rule out democracy allying itself with a kind of pseudo-scientific health-worshipping eco-maniacal post-family feminism, culminating in a whopping tyranny to make autocracy, or even oriental despotism, look like a Boy Scout jamboree.
Nor would I rule out crusading Christianity reverting to its medieval roots and putting itself on a collision course with the Muslim rage of fulminating Islam. Here, Tancred, say hello to Saladin! I wouldn't rule out anything, not even peace and tranquility, albeit more likely as a result of repression than of good government.
I'd give individual liberty the worst odds. I think it will continue to decline in the 21st century.
Ultimately, who wins? Since we're into crystal ball-gazing, let me end with a cautionary tale. It's rutting season, and the deer are alert. Younger stags have retreated to the rill, licking their wounds. Some foul old stags are fighting it out in the clearing. Watching them from the hillside, a young hind is very excited.
"Which one will win, which one will win?" she presses a mature mamma-deer standing next to her.
"I don't know," says the experienced hind, "but I can tell you this. Whoever wins, you and I will be screwed."