Liberalism

Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is contested, as it was during the Cold War. The future could have been capitalist or communist, or perhaps a blend of both systems — ‘convergence’ was a trendy notion for a time — but one way or another the alternatives were clear. After the Cold War, there were no alternatives. Capitalism, democracy and liberalism were here to stay, and soon they would be everywhere else too. All the Islamic world needed if it was to join us at the end of history was a nudge: regime change would speedily bring about social and economic change.

Keir Starmer obviously regrets visiting Jesus House last week because of the furore it has caused in his own party. But he will likely come to regret his reaction even more. The Labour leader posted a full apology for the Pentecostal church visit, saying: ‘I completely disagree with Jesus House’s beliefs on LGBT+ rights, which I was not aware of before my visit. I apologise for the hurt my visit caused and have taken down the video. It was a mistake and I accept that.’ The whole thing is, as Brendan O’Neill points out, rather awkward, given Starmer chose to visit this church during a key Christian festival and given non-mainstream views on homosexuality are a feature not just of many churches but many other religious groups.

The world has many island nations, and sometimes the United States counts itself among them. We have water on either side of us, and though we share our big island with Canada and Mexico, neither poses any threat. America is immune to invasion, a castle surrounded by the safest of moats. This wasn’t always so, and it isn’t really true today, unless we forget about Hawaii and our Pacific and Caribbean territories, most of which would be easy prey for other states if they weren’t under our sovereignty. In the earliest days of the republic, we shared the North American continent with outposts of Europe’s leading powers: France, Russia, Spain and Britain.

I was never afraid of Jeremy Corbyn, never afraid of Momentum. I’ve never really feared Britain’s hard left at all. They’re wrong, of course, and they can do some serious localised damage; but their ideology is so obviously daft and has so comprehensively failed wherever in the 20th century it was tried that they occupy in my mind a position similar to that of Satanists. Grisly, yes, but a threat to civilised society? Hardly. The hard left always gets found out in the end, and always will. Their doctrines have no natural appeal to the middle-of-the-road British (which is most of us) and in the unlikely event they were ever elected to government, they’d soon enough crash the car.

If we’ve confirmed anything in 2020, it is that liberal-progressives really do control the major influencers in America. This puts them at odds with a large number of Americans.The entertainment industry has long belonged to the Michael Moores and Barbra Streisands of the world. A few conservatives like Tom Selleck and Kelsey Grammar managed to scratch out careers by largely remaining silent about their political beliefs, but Hollywood inundates Americans with messages largely antithetical to faith, family and free markets.Donald Trump’s arrival made clear, too, that most major media organizations in America are far more hostile to conservatives than even the most ardent Fox News fan believed.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.   The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.

Can we still say that we live in a liberal age? We live, now, in the age of an epidemic. Calling for a political order that can effectively respond to such a disease is starting to sound a lot like calling for a post-liberal order. In the pages of the Atlantic, Adrian Vermeule has made something of the same point: the order that we have been living under is clearly unequipped to deal with crises of the nature of this epidemic. The common libertarian conservative position that any government action on this is a violation of the rights of the individual, shows the fundamental insanity of libertarianism. My father used to quote Voltaire to me: 'My right to punch you in the nose ends where your nose begins.

Is America becoming a developing country? We’re seeing increasing evidence of reverse convergence. We used to think that the developing world would in time become like America, but it now seems that the United States has developed an emulation complex of its own. What has not been explained are the reasons. In some fundamental areas America does resemble a traditional society, with its belief in transcendence and its quaint ways of enforcing justice and delivering public goods. The US executes prisoners on a scale matched only by China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Guns are more readily available than in Pakistan and more than half of Americans pray every single day. No other state spends so much money on health care, yet Americans’ life expectancy keeps falling.

We’re entering the post-liberal moment. From Trump to Brexit, Ireland to Brazil, we’ve seen a number of revolts at the ballot box that point to a mass vote of no-confidence in the economic and cultural status quo — in other words, in 21st-century liberalism. The liberals aren’t taking it lying down. They’re doing their best to define post-liberalism in language they are most comfortable with, calling it ‘fascist’ or ‘communist’ — and sometimes the criticism is spot-on. But other times it is wholly inaccurate. One of the glaring paradoxes of the post-liberal moment is that many of the people involved in it want to rescue liberalism from itself.

Politicians, said the historian A.J.P. Taylor, do not create the current of events. They can only float along with them and try to steer. But he was talking about the long contours of European history, not the sudden and shocking arrival of a global pandemic. How to float along and steer through something that looks like an overwhelming tsunami is, largely, unknown. The outbreak of coronavirus has already put much of the world in lockdown. It has pushed the global economy into freefall, killed more than 13,000 people and could yet kill hundreds of thousands more, perhaps millions. It will also have big political effects. Leaders, governments, even ideologies will be judged according to how well they meet the crisis and the fallout.