Liberalism and the search for meaning

The worst option except for all the others

This is the second post in our series on American liberalism. You can read the first, in which I tried to lay some terminological groundwork, here.

America’s lost liberal center

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I favor a mostly deflationary account of the crisis of American liberalism.

In retrospect, the decision of G.O.P. establishment elites to bandwagon around the younger brother of unpopular former President George W. Bush in the 2016 cycle was an odd tactical choice. So was the decision of Democratic Party establishment elites to bandwagon around a candidate who Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid all worked extremely hard to deny the 2008 nomination.

Which is to say that my primary view is that Donald Trump winning caused the crisis of liberalism, in contrast to the more mainstream view that Trump’s victory was the consequence of some major substantive failure of liberalism (or “neo”-liberalism if you prefer).

Of course, it would be obtuse to say that liberals and liberalism have been flawless in the 21st century. But I think the flaws of liberal leadership manifested primarily in areas that are explicitly at the margins of what liberal philosophy and political theory are about — notably macroeconomic management and issues related to America’s relationship with foreigners. Those issues will be addressed later in this series.

What I want to talk about today is a charge against liberalism that I think is mostly bogus: the idea that liberalism is to blame for the crisis of meaning or lack of community that many people perceive in the world.

On December 7, for example, Ezra Klein linked his growing concern with the amount of time people spend on compulsive online scrolling with Michael Sandel’s longstanding communitarian critique of liberalism. Just a few days earlier, Ross Douthat likewise argued that an old reactionary critique of liberalism — “that what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie” — has “garnered new force in the last two decades because of a very specific interaction between technological change and libertarian values.”

I think this is an old mistake with two major parts.