The idea that Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine would be a restorative tonic
for Western liberalism, touted hopefully in the first few weeks of war, has
taken sharp blows in recent days.
اضافة اعلان
First came the election in Hungary, where Viktor
Orban’s conservative populist government won a sweeping popular majority,
despite — or, more likely, because of — Orban’s relative dovish approach to the
struggle in Ukraine. Then came the presidential election polling out of France,
where Marine Le Pen is suddenly climbing in second-round polls, threatening Emmanuel
Macron with a shocking upset.
Le Pen will probably still lose, not least because
her past friendliness to Putin will get more attention between this weekend’s
first-round vote and the runoff. But there is no sign yet that the war has
prompted a vast revulsion against nationalism or populism, a stampede back to
the liberal establishment.
Another possibility, however, is that the Ukraine
war could help the liberal establishment in the long run, by encouraging an
internal reassessment of what liberalism itself should seek to be.
For example, a writer who seemed overly hopeful
about the liberal-revival scenario in the first days of the war, Francis
Fukuyama, has now written a searching essay for Foreign Affairs on why
“liberalism needs the nation” arguing that the heroic resistance of the
Ukrainians should teach liberals a lesson about the virtues of national
identity.
“With their bravery,” he writes, the Ukrainians
“have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only
when those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own.”
The challenge, though, is that the “sense of national purpose” Fukuyama is praising in Ukraine conspicuously depends on an external enemy, a wolf at the door, and you cannot simply will such an enemy into being.
The war has thus been a partial rebuke to the
fantasy of a pure cosmopolitanism, of a liberalism that transcends borders,
languages and specific histories. And it has offered a case study in how the nation-state,
its loves and loyalties, can unite a disparate population around a common cause
in a way that no supranational institution has ever been able to achieve.
The challenge, though, is that the “sense of
national purpose” Fukuyama is praising in Ukraine conspicuously depends on an
external enemy, a wolf at the door, and you cannot simply will such an enemy
into being. (Nor should you wish to!) Whereas most of the peacetime sources of
national solidarity he cites, from food and sports to literary traditions, are
somewhat thinner things. And one of the potentially thicker forces, a sense of
religious unity within a liberal order, Fukuyama rules out: in a pluralist
society, “the idea of restoring a shared moral tradition defined by religious
belief is a nonstarter”, leading only to sectarianism and violence if applied.
That might be too simplistic. Certainly you cannot
impose strict religious uniformity upon a pluralist democracy. But the liberal
order in America, at least, long relied for solidarity and purpose on a softer
religious consensus, a flexible religious center, based on Protestant
Christianity and then expanding to a more ecumenical but still biblically
rooted vision.
From the 19th century through the civil rights era,
this shared worldview supplied not just a generic unity but a constant moral
touchstone for would-be reformers, a metaphysical horizon for the entire
American project.
Here Fukuyama’s essay might be usefully supplemented
by my New York Times colleague Ezra Klein’s recent meditation on how Western
liberalism appears when seen through the eyes of its enemies — meaning not just
Putinism, with its spurious Christian justifications for aggressive war, but
certain radical-right philosophers who have rejected liberalism and Christianity
together, seeing the latter as the original source of liberalism’s
egalitarianism, its attention to the poor and marginalized, and its restless
quest for universal dignity (all of which they reject and despise).
To push Klein’s idea a little further, you might say
that since the 1960s, when the old Protestant consensus cracked up, the
American system has been in search of a form of religion that can ground its
liberalism in something like that way.
That search has been unsuccessful. The religious
right proved too conservative and parochial (and scandal plagued) for a diverse
and liberalizing country, and it cracked up with George W. Bush’s presidency.
The liberal Christianity of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, while in certain ways
better suited to hold the religious center, lacks internal vitality and is
easily subsumed into a mixture of pantheism and gnosticism, with its moral
vision supplied by a progressive activism that is intolerant in its own
distinctive way. These failures have left us with a spiritual competition
between an ascendant wokeness and a resentful Christian nationalism, which is
not likely to supply unity or solidarity to anyone.
But notably, throughout these culture wars,
liberalism’s inner party, its intellectual elite, has retained a conception of
itself as resolutely secular, persistently imagining a perfected,
post-religious liberal order that can establish solidarity and purpose without
any of the old American appeals to providence or nature’s God.
It will be a sign that liberalism is ready to
confront its present challenges, all the unhappiness of its citizens and
children, when that illusion is finally and irrevocably put away.
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