Category Archives: Liberal

Regarding Jennifer Grahams opinion piece (The culture war will continue to rage in 2021, Jan. 3), it lays out clearly that there is a culture war and it is mainly over such as things as abortion, same-sex marriage and religion. She seems to blame the war part on conservatives (seven times); Republicans, including Trump and Reagan (3 times); and Santa Claus (once). Santa is the only one on the left. She never mentions Antifa, Black Lives Matter or riots. She seems to praise Biden (who blames Trump for killing more than 300,000 Americans) for wanting to be president for all Americans. If you oppose the lefts agenda to change American culture, you are a culture warrior.

She should have read the adjoining article (Gordon B. Hinckleys Standing for Something turns 20, and its the handbook our politics needs today, Jan. 1), which quotes President Hinckleys book and public statements on the growing moral deficit in America and that religion has left the public square and substituted human sophistry for the wisdom of the Almighty. We should add his name to the leaders who are waging cultural warfare by opposing abortion and supporting virtue.

As the scriptures indicate, there will always be a culture war between good and evil.

Lee Farnsworth

Provo

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Letter: The culture war is just as much liberal as it is conservative - Deseret News

The world is saying goodbye to liberalism. Right-wing politicians win elections by denouncing liberals and preside over self-centred states wearing the badge of aggression against liberal fascists. The US under Donald Trump, India under Narendra Modi, the UK under Boris Johnson, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan and most East European states who maltreat refugees and shun foreigners foreshadow the misfortunes of tomorrow. Pakistan is no exception.

In March 2009, addressing a lawyers gathering at the Rawalpindi Bar, lmran Khan belaboured a certain section of society as liberals who fly in the face of national emotion and hurt the state of Pakistan. He particularly condemned their interpretation of the phenomenon of the Taliban and their obedient following of dictation from the US in this regard. (Five years later in 2014 Taliban gunmen stormed the Army Public School in the northern city of Peshawar. More than 150 people were killed, 132 of them children.) He had also blamed the liberals for causing the massacre of Lal Masjid in 2007 by pressuring the Musharraf regime into taking brutal action against its innocent seminarians.

He called those who set great store by human rights liberal fascists, a label that resonated with most Urdu columnists in a predominantly religious or ideological Pakistan. Since Pakistan was never dominated by liberal fascists it is quite possible that he was attacking them in order to allow himself to ignore the violation of human rights by those who operated against the writ of the state in the Tribal Areas. But oddly, Khan never stopped being the favourite of the very liberals he berated. He was an icon whose achievement as a social worker they recognised to strengthen their own argument.

Where does extremism spring from? If you take liberal uncertainty and doubt as your norm, then one can say extremism springs from certitude. In doubt, there is freedom to make concessions to those who think differently. Doubt here includes self-doubt to allow for a measure of altruism. It is also from doubt that moderation emanates: The instinct of standing in the middle when everyone is taking sides and is getting ready to clash.

The conservative is surer of his thinking because it is connected to the known past; the liberal is less sure-footed because he wants to question the entrenched attitudes of the past. It is certitude that inclines us to punish those who dont agree with us. The liberal will appeal to us to consider his argument but will not threaten us if we reject him. The misapplied term liberal fascist implies power that the liberal does not wish to possess because he knows that his thinking is too individualistic for the formulation of a group capable of wielding the power to punish.

The liberal voice as the gnawing conscience of the nation has bothered others too. Pakistans top Urdu columnist published a plaint against the liberals on February 3, 2001: The liberals are busy demonising the Taliban and predicting Talibanisation of Pakistan. On the other hand, Islamic movements have a way of becoming moderate after reaching a certain level of intensity, as it happened in Iran and is bound to happen in Afghanistan.

According to the above columnist, Pakistani society was altogether of a different sort and would not succumb to Talibanisation after the Taliban have completed their conquest of Afghanistan. In fact, Pakistan was a cosmopolitan society and would remain cosmopolitan and would never allow the religious fanatics to take over even if the latter became stronger than at present.

In his next column (February 9, 2001), the same columnist rebutted the liberal exaggeration that, after the jihadi outfits are done with Kashmir, they will turn upon Pakistan. He even quoted a Quranic verse in Sura Al Kafirun and its message of tolerance as proof of Islam being a liberal religion.

Eight years down the road, the marginal liberal was proved right. But judging from the way the critique of Talibanisation has spread around the country, one has to concede that liberalism is not a political creed but a bent of personality that may be found in elements in both right-wing and left-wing parties, and even among religious leaders.

This article first appeared in the print edition on December 26, 2020, under the title Liberalism In Crisis. The writer is consulting editor Newsweek Pakistan.

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In Pakistan, the misfortunes of fundamentalism were foreshadowed - The Indian Express

In the weeks following the presidential election, there has been upheaval within the conservative media world that has long been dominated by Fox News. Lesser-known cable-TV companies, such as Newsmax and OAN, have seen explosive growth as these networks have drawn in supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump and his claims of election fraud.

Originally founded in 1998 by Chris Ruddy as a conservative news website, the company launched its cable-news channel in 2014. Today, Newsmaxheadquartered in Boca Raton, Fla., with offices in New York, Los Angeles and Washingtonsays its channel reaches 70 million households. Its network is found on most major cable and satellite operators, such as DirecTV, Dish, Xfinity, Fios, Optimum and even newer streaming services like Fubo and Sling.

However, the company has hit some barriers in its expansion with cable operators such as RCN, which serves major markets such as New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, refusing to carry its network. RCN, along with its partners Grande Communications and Wave Broadband, form the sixth-largest cable operator in the United States with some 1 million customers.

Newsmax has accused RCN of liberal bias and has urged its viewers to contact the company to demand it carry Newsmax.

RCN is the only major cable company not taking Newsmax, and weve heard it has everything to do with its chairman, who is a strong Democrat who opposes Trump and backed financially [President-elect Joe] Biden and [California Sen.] Adam Schiff, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy told JNS.

RCN is managed by Patriot Media, led by Steve Simmons. According to FEC data, Simmons donated to several Democrats, including Joe Biden, Adam Schiff and Seth Moulton during the 2019 presidential primaries. Recently, it was announced that Patriot Media was sold by TPG (Texas Pacific Group) from Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners.

While RCN did not respond to a JNS inquiry, an RCN official told the Jewish Press of New York that it does not currently have information available as to when or if Newsmax will be added to our lineup, and further invited customers to email a request for this channel.

Since the Nov. 3 election, Newsmax has seen explosive growth in viewership at the expense of its much larger, right-wing cable-news rival Fox News.

According to Nielsen, in the final full week before the election, Fox News had 90 times greater primetime ratings than Newsmax; however, in the first full week after the election, the lead by Fox News declined to less than nine times the ratings, and by the end of November, it was down to seven times.

While Fox News remains the most-watched cable-news networkbesting its traditional rivals CNN and MSNBCNewsmax has seen considerable momentum with 401,000 primetime views by the end of November, compared to 57,000 in late October, according to Nielsen. The recent Nielsen ratings list Newsmax as a top 25 cable new channel and the fourth-ranked news channel ahead of HLN, CNBC, and Fox Business.

Much of Newsmaxs momentum has been tied to Trumps legal challenges against the results of the November election. The president has promoted the network on his social media, and conservative commentators have lambasted Fox News for its coverage of the election, specifically its decision to call the election for Biden.

While conservatives have gravitated towards Newsmax and other outlets such as OAN since the election, some supporters of Israel have long seen news outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and others have a place for fairer coverage of the Jewish state.

Since I founded Newsmax in 1998, we have always stood with Israel, our lone democratic ally in the Mideast. Most U.S. media has largely been hostile to Israel, making Newsmaxs role even more important, said Ruddy.

Alex Safian, associate director of CAMERA, a media watchdog organization, told JNS that both Fox News and Newsmax have a number of opinion hosts who are generally fair to Israel.

Opinion hosts on both FoxNews and NewsMaxTV are generally fair to Israel Foxs Sean Hannity is an unabashed friend of Israel, and NewsMaxTV hosts like Greg Kelly and Seb Gorka have also been fair to Israel, he said.

But the news is a different story, with Foxs former Jerusalem reporters Reena Ninan and Conor Powell usually bashing Israel, and current reporter Trey Yingst not much better, Safian said, pointing a recent article on COVID in Gaza, which Yingst did not provide an Israeli rebuttal to charges by a Hamas official that Israels blockade of the coastal territory was harming efforts to fight the virus in the coastal territory.

Its fine for Yingst to quote [Hamas official Dr. Basem] Naims charge, but he lets it stand unrebutted, with no opportunity given to Israeli officials to point out accurately that its totally false. Not to say that all of Yingsts reports are hostile towards Israel, just that a lot of them are, he said.

Newsmax doesnt seem to have an Israel bureau, but if they open one it seems likely their viewers will expect them to do a better job than Fox has been doing.

Supporters of Israel have accused mainstream media outlets of bias and have contended that conservative outlets such as Fox News have provided fairer coverage of Israel. Fox News has capitalized on this, by promoting headlines accusing outlets such as The New York Times of anti-Israel bias. This appeal to conservatives led the network to cable-news dominance and a strong influence over conservative thought and access to the Trump administration in recent years.

Ido Aharoni, former Israeli ambassador and New York consul general, told JNS that Newsmax has long been promoting fair coverage of Israel.

For a very long time, Newsmax and Chris Ruddy have been among the State of Israels closest friends in U.S. media. Its very surprising RCN isnt carrying them.

Ruddy said he understands that everyone may not support Israel or the president, but that they should have the opportunity to hear varying sides of political news and opinion.

We get everyone doesnt like Trump or Israel, but if they were truly liberal they would be open to diverse points of view, which clearly RCN is not.

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Newsmax accuses cable operator RCN of 'liberal bias' as it seeks to expand availability - Cleveland Jewish News

As partisan news networks like Fox News and MSNBC have risen in popularity, so has the polarization of many Americans political views. In new research, Jay Hmielowski, Myiah Hutchens, and Michael Beam find that while both liberal and conservative media contribute to polarization, conservatives are more likely to be part of a media echo chamber, trusting fewer sources and seeking information from a narrower range of news outlets.

Have you rolled your eyes at those who are wearing masks in public? Or do you involuntarily grimace when you see a MAGA sign? These reactions are increasingly common in an environment where beliefs have become more polarized. Increases in polarization have dove-tailed with the rise of partisan 24-hour news networks like the conservative Fox News and liberal MSNBC and fragmented internet news sites that cater to specific political beliefs. People who study political communication have long argued that the increasingly partisan news environment is related to partisan beliefs. Our recent study aims to disentangle these relationships by studying media use and polarized attitudes.

We found that watching both liberal and conservative media equally contribute to holding partisan beliefs, i.e. those which align with those of particular political parties. However, in comparison to liberal beliefs, people holding conservative partisan beliefs were more likely to tune into conservative media and then subsequently held even stronger conservative beliefs.

We looked at how these relationships developed over time using a three-wave panel study collected by the survey firm YouGov in the lead up to the 2016 US presidential election. We measured data just after the political conventions in July, just after the Presidential debates in October, and the week before the general election. During each wave we asked how frequently participants used various media outlets and their views on three politicized issues: immigration, guns, and law enforcement.

We looked at the relationships between media use and beliefs in three different ways. First, to what extent did media use foster later political beliefs; second, to what extent did political beliefs foster later media use; and third, what was the overtime, reinforcing, nature of the relationship between media and belief?

Our results show that both liberal and conservative media could be causing changes to the publics attitudes. In both cases, consuming partisan media was associated with holding beliefs consistent with the media outlet (i.e., conservative beliefs leading to conservative attitudes). Therefore, our results suggest that both liberal and conservative partisan media are likely contributing to polarization in the US.

We find different results when looking at the effect of beliefs on news selection. Our study did not find that holding a liberal position on a topic led to increased use of liberal media use in the future. By contrast, holding conservative beliefs was associated with increased use of conservative media sources. In other words, if you hold a conservative position relative to the issue of gun rights, then youre likely to seek out Fox News in the future.

Our most important finding is whether beliefs and use create what is known as an echo chamber, a space where the reinforcing effect of media and beliefs drive people to wall themselves off from a wider range of media. Our results did not find evidence that liberals live in a media echo chamber. Indeed, there may not be an echo chamber for liberals because they are consuming a wider range of views. Research has shown that liberals tend to report higher levels of trust in media, generally, and higher levels of trust in more outlets compared to conservatives. Therefore, although attention to liberal media sources could lead certain people to hold more extreme attitudes, these attitudes do not seem to increase use of partisan media because they could also consume other outlets that breaks this reinforcing process.

By contrast, our results did find a reinforcing relationship between conservative beliefs and media use. Other scholars have shown that conservatives tend to trust fewer media sources, which likely results in them in consuming a narrow range of news outlets. As a result, conservatives are more likely to be living in a communication echo chamber where beliefs and media use reinforce themselves over time. Evidence that suggests conservatives are higher in personality traits such as closemindedness may also help explain this reinforcing relationship.

While we demonstrate that we have reasons to be concerned about potentially polarizing effects of both liberal and conservative media, the larger concern is that conservative seem to be living in more of a communication bubble than their liberal counterparts. Prominent conservative media, like the thriving conservative radio ecosystem, has existed in the United States for much longer than prominent liberal media; therefore, it could be that conservatives simply have a head start in creating these closed communication circles. If liberals do catch up, our ability to work together as citizens, rather than as opposing ideological combatants, might continue to diminish.

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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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About the authors

Jay Hmielowski The University of FloridaJay Hmielowski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida. His research interests include environmental, science, and political communication. He is interested in understanding why different messages are effective or ineffective at changing peoples attitudes and beliefs associated with various environmental, science, and political issues. He is also interested in how peoples attitudes and beliefs affect their information seeking behaviors.

Myiah Hutchens The University of FloridaMyiah Hutchens is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida. Her research interests focus on political communication. Specifically, her work centers on how communication functions in democratic processes that is, to help or hinder political processes. Her research generally focuses on what leads people to seek out diverse perspectives particularly views they disagree with and how individuals then process that disagreement.

Michael Beam Kent State UniversityMichael Beam is the director of the School of Emerging Media and Technology at Kent State University. His research investigates the impact of media systems on the process of information creation, exposure, and processing. His research has focused on the impact of information systems using personalized algorithms on news exposure and health communication, the influence of partisan media sources on political polarization and political information processing, and how new media systems change information distribution patterns.

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Conservatives are more likely than liberals to exist in a media echo chamber - USAPP American Politics and Policy (blog)

Justice Stephen Breyer (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I think you tend to look from 30,000 feet, say, more often than you did. On the other hand, this great wisdom youre supposed to acquire over time does quite often express itself in something that sounds as if it came out of a fortune cookie. So there are pluses and minuses.

Whether its always to the left, I dont know. Its very hard to say.

Justice Stephen Breyer, expounding upon whether judges and justices get more liberal as they get older, during an interview with Slates Dahlia Lithwick. [T]he court changes very, very, very slowly over long periods of time, Breyer later added. Thats what I think, because its the legal view and this sort of jurisprudential view: What is the country like? Whats this Constitution about? What is the court about? What is its proper role? Those questions will never be answered.

Staci Zaretskyis a senior editor at Above the Law, where shes worked since 2011. Shed love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Do Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Age? - Above the Law

In the extraordinary aftermath of the American presidential election, as Donald Trump set about de-legitimising the countrys democratic process in order to stay in power, a timely investigation was published in a New York-based cultural magazine.

The piece examined the angry internal battles that broke out at the New York Times as the paper grappled with how to cover the upheaval that accompanied Trumps uniquely divisive presidency. Confronted with a leader who delights in flouting democratic norms and attacking minorities, was it the duty of this bastion of American liberalism to remain above the fray and give house-room to a wide range of views? Or should it play a partisan role in defence of the values under attack?

As journalists and staff argued online, a prominent columnist, the investigation reported uploaded a PDF of John Rawlss treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion. Rawls, who died in 2002, remains the most celebrated philosopher of the basic principles of Anglo-American liberalism. These were laid out in his seminal text, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. The columnist, Elizabeth Bruenig, suggested to colleagues: What were having is really a philosophical conversation and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism. I think all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives. One respondent wrote back witheringly: Philosophy schmosiphy. Were at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?

In an age of polarisation, the exchange encapsulated a central question for the liberal left in America and beyond. Jagged faultlines have disfigured the public square during a period in which issues of race, gender, class and nationhood have divided societies. So was Bruenig right? To rebuild trust and a sense of common purpose, can we learn something by revisiting the most influential postwar philosopher in the English-speaking world?

In a couple of weeks time, it will be 50 years since A Theory of Justice was published. Written during the Vietnam war, it became an unlikely success, selling more than 300,000 copies in the US alone. In the philosophical pantheon, it put Rawls up there with JS Mill and John Locke. In 1989, copies were waved by protesting Chinese students in Tiananamen Square. Passages have been cited in US supreme court judgments. Next year, eminent political philosophers from around the world will congregate in the United States to celebrate the golden anniversary of the books publication and discuss its enduring impact. Half a century on, it seems that Rawlss magnum opus is once again making the weather in discussions about the fair society.

Its central assertion was that freedom and equality can be reconciled in a consensual vision, to which all members of a society can sign up, whatever their station in life. This became and remains the aspiration for all liberal democracies. But did the Harvard philosopher get it right?

The vision of fairness in A Theory of Justice aspired to what Rawls called the perspective of eternity. But it was also a book of its time. Twenty years or so in the making, its preoccupations were formed first by the authors youthful encounter with the horrors of totalitarianism, world war, the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

Rawls fought in the Pacific and lost his religious convictions as he lived through one of the darkest ages of human experience. By developing a comprehensive philosophy of a free, fair society, he hoped to promote a secular faith in human co-operation. As Catherine Audard, a biographer of Rawls and the chair of the Forum for European Philosophy, puts it: His ambition was to find a language or argument that would convey concern for minorities, after the way human beings had been treated in the war and of course the Holocaust.

The eruption of the civil rights movement, feminism and radical leftism in the 1960s lent this task even greater urgency. Much of mainstream Anglo-American philosophy of the time was abstruse and insular. But Rawls produced a book intended to lay out fair rules for a just society. It was breathtakingly ambitious, says Audard: He asked: what was a reasonable view of justice that a wide consensus could agree on. And he did something that was absolutely new. He linked the idea that you would fight for the rule of law for democratic institutions to a simultaneous battle against poverty and inequality.

So on the one hand you have political liberalism defence of the rule of law, formal rights and so on. And on the other hand you had social liberalism, which was concerned with questions of equality, inclusion and social justice. To unite the two in this way was revolutionary for liberals at the time.

The means by which Rawls pulled off his ingenious synthesis was a thought-experiment which he called the original position. Imagine, he suggested, if a society gathered to debate the principles of justice in a kind of town hall meeting, but no one knew anything about themselves. No one knows his place in society, wrote Rawls, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.

Passing judgment from behind this veil of ignorance, he believed, people would adopt two main principles. First, there should be extensive and equal basic liberties. Second, resulting social and economic inequalities should be managed to the greatest benefit of the disadvantaged. Inequality could only be justified to the extent it provided material benefit to the least well-off. This template, hoped Rawls, would make intuitive sense to everyone who imagined themselves into the original position.

It was a vision that set the parameters of western liberalism in subsequent decades. The book stands out as one of the great achievements of 20th-century Anglo-American political philosophy, says Michael Sandel, arguably Rawlss successor as the worlds most famous public philosopher.

As a young professor, Sandel got to know Rawls at Harvard in the 1980s. He systematised and articulated a generous vision of a liberal welfare state, a vision that reflected the idealism of liberal and progressive politics as it emerged from the 1960s. The greatest philosophical works express the spirit of their age and this was true of A Theory of Justice.

Following its triumphant publication however, the times began to change at dizzying speed. De-industrialisation bestowed a bitter legacy of distrust, division and disillusionment in the west, symbolised in Britain by the scars left by miners strike of 1984. Marketisation and the rise of the new right inaugurated an era in which growing inequality was not only sanctioned but celebrated as Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics. The neo-liberal dismantling of the welfare state sidelined the ethos of Rawlsian egalitarianism. By the late 1990s, a senior Labour party politician, Peter Mandelson, felt able to declare himself intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they paid their taxes. Other threats emerged. During the 2000s, religious fundamentalism emerged as a sometimes violent rejection of the freedoms envisaged by political liberalism.

Following the financial crash, further culture wars ignited, dividing liberal cities from socially conservative hinterlands amid a resurgent nationalism. A new focus on systemic racism led to the formation of movements such as Black Lives Matter. There is now a palpable crisis of faith in the possibility of the kind of consensus that Rawls hoped to philosophically ground. What was it that A Theory of Justice didnt foresee, or value enough, or understand?

Rawlss philosophical aim was to offer a justification for a generous welfare state, says Sandel, who is a sympathetic critic of his former colleague. This was based not on invoking communal ties or allegiances, but on an individualistic thought-experiment involving rational choice. The starting point of the argument was individualism the idea that if you set aside for the moment all your particular aims and attachments, you would, on reflection, prudentially choose principles of justice that would care for the least well-off.

It was a strategy based on achieving consensus through a kind of neutrality. Interests, along with particular values, perspectives and histories, were put to one side in the original position. Judges and politicians would act according to the principles established in that rarefied atmosphere. The problem raised by Rawlss critics is that, bluntly, in real life people dont act or think like that. From the right, opponents contested Rawlss prioritisation of the less well-off. Why should lifes strivers only gain the rewards they merited, if the least well-off benefited too? On the left, Rawls was accused of failing to recognise that vested interests and big finance use their power to bend modern democracies according to their will. In a major study of Rawls published last year, another Harvard academic, Katrina Forrester, writes that he assumed an incremental path toward a constitutionalist, consensual ideal. That vision didnt think hard enough, she suggests, about the basis and persistence of exclusions based on race, class or gender. In America, it treated, for example, the history of black chattel slavery as a unique original sin or a contingent aberration.

Audard agrees that the books abstract methodology was problematic. A philosopher colleague once said to me that A Theory of Justice looks at issues as if theyre being debated in a Harvard senior common room, she says. Its true that Rawls was too trusting in the US constitution and not aware enough of the dark side of politics and power. He did not take on board the depth of social passions, interests and conflicts.

Nevertheless, she points out, the insistence that inequality undermines democratic societies has been amply vindicated. As divergences in wealth and circumstance deepened, and the welfare state became a minimalist safety net, faith in the social contract eroded and identity politics boomed. Contemporary interest in a universal basic income, says Audard, is one example of how Rawlss liberal egalitarianism is still relevant to the fractured politics of 2020. There is a lot of interest at the moment in his critique of the capitalist welfare state and a lot of work going on in that area.

In divided times though, Sandel believes that liberal neutrality is not enough. The ideal of social solidarity and consensus, to which Rawls devoted his lifes work, can only be realised by a practical and plural politics which engages with real people, with all their varied histories and disagreements.

The liberalism of abstractions and neutrality fails to provide a compelling account of what holds societies together. The political arena is messier and less decorous than the court, which deals with abstract principles. But its ultimately a better way to genuine pluralism and mutual respect, Sandel says.

Fifty years is a long time to stay talked about and relevant. Although he became a critic of Rawls, Sandel remains most of all an admirer: He remains an inspiration to those of us who believe that it is possible to reason together about the meaning of justice and the common good, at a time when we seem to despair of the possibility of doing so. The spirit of his work is summed up in the injunction that we should agree to share one anothers fate. This, says Sandel, is an enduring moral argument against inequality. And a reminder that the world is not necessarily the way it has to be.

Going beyond Rawls, in an attempt to change the world, might just be the political and philosophical challenge of the age.

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John Rawls: can liberalism's great philosopher come to the west's rescue again? - The Guardian

Politically conservative individuals tend to have greater confidence in their judgments, while political liberals have a tendency to second guess themselves, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Several studies have found that differences in cognitive styles are related to differences in political orientation. But the new study, conducted by Benjamin C. Ruisch, a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University, and Chadly Stern, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, was the first to systematically examine differences in confidence.

The idea came to us from a few different directions, explained Ruisch. First, it was a pattern that we were seeing in our data a lot. At the time, we were conducting research in which we were using different tasks from the judgment and decision-making literature things like dot estimation, memory games, etc. and we were consistently seeing this pattern emerging across a wide range of different tasks.

However, one of the things that really redoubled our interest in the topic was the 2016 presidential primaries and, in particular, the divergent paths that were followed by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Ruisch said. Although Bernie was seen as the more progressive candidate and had substantial grassroots support, liberals/Democrats ultimately nominated a more centrist candidate, Hillary Clinton. And one of their main reasons for doing so was a lack of confidence namely, that they were uncertain that Sanders would ultimately be able to win the election.

Trump, conversely, followed a very different political path. Although he was openly opposed by many high-profile Republican leaders, he defied the polls to receive the Republican presidential nomination and, ultimately, win the presidency. His surprising political success, in no small part, was driven by the unwavering confidence of his supporters: Despite the apparently overwhelming odds, the opposition from Republican leadership, and the emergence of a number of political scandals, Trumps support among American conservatives was, and remains, remarkably and unprecedentedly stable.

The more that we thought about it, the more that this liberal-conservative confidence gap seemed as though it could explain a lot of what was happening on the US political stage, Ruisch explained. The potential implications for the political sphere in particular were a big part of what motivated our initial interest in this research question, as well as some of the follow-up work that were doing now.

In 14 studies, which included 4,575 participants in total, the researchers found that conservative individuals tended to express greater confidence in their judgments and decisions compared to liberal individuals. This conservatismconfidence relationship was observed across a range of different tasks.

For example, in one study, the participants were asked to recall information from their everyday environment and report their confidence in their memories. In another study, the participants were asked to estimate the distance between themselves and various objects, and then report their confidence in their estimate. In yet another, the participants completed a color pattern memory task and were given the opportunity to place a small bet on their performance.

Basically, regardless of what the task was, conservatives were more confident that they were answering correctly, and liberals were less so, Ruisch told PsyPost. Importantly, though, it was almost never the case that liberals and conservatives differed in the actual accuracy of their responses; they differed only in their subjective feelings that their responses were correct.

The researchers also found that conservatives were more likely to agree with statements such as When I am confronted with a problem, Im dying to reach a solution very quickly, and those who agreed with such statements tended to have more confidence in their decisions. Conservatives were also more likely to seize and freeze on an initial judgement and consider fewer alternative options compared to their liberal counterparts.

Conservatives tend to go with their gut and make quicker, more intuitive decisions, Ruisch explained. Because they spend less time agonizing about which response might be correct, they tend to feel more confident in the response that they ultimately select. Liberals, conversely, tend to consider a broader range of responses. Thinking of all the different answers thatcouldbe correct then leads them to feel less confident in the answer that they ultimately choose.

That said, though, these differences in deliberation versus intuition only appear to be part of the story. Our results suggest that there are other, yet-unidentified factors that also help give rise to these ideological differences in confidence. One factor that were currently examining is the degree to which a person is exposed to alternative viewpoints and differing opinions. There is some evidence that conservatives tend to live in more homogeneous communities, surrounded by people with similar backgrounds and life experiences.

Liberals, conversely, tend to come from more diverse backgrounds, Ruisch continued. We suspect that this might also play a role in shaping these ideological differences in confidence. If youre generally surrounded by people who think the same way that you do, there may be less reason to doubt that the way you see the world is objectively correct. On the other hand, if you are consistently exposed to people whose views fundamentally differ from your own, you might be more likely to question whether your worldview is truly the objectively correct one.

The findings have some practical implications as well.

Our work doesnt say anything about what the right amount of confidence is, but theres probably a sweet spot that is somewhere in between these two extremes. So, to liberals we might say: Dont overthink things. And to conservatives: Sometimes you should distrust your gut, Ruisch told PsyPost.

For people whose job it is to motivate action among liberals and conservatives, these findings might also be worth bearing in mind. Liberals seem to kind of be chronic second guessers, which can decrease their confidence that they hold the right answer. So to get liberals to act, you might need to undercut this baseline tendency towards extensive and possibly excessive deliberation.

The study, The Confident Conservative: Ideological Differences in Judgment and Decision-Making, was published online August 13, 2020.

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Study: Liberals are prone to chronic second guessing, while conservatives tend to go with their gut - PsyPost

By Laura K. Field

This is part 1 of a 5-part series. Read the full series here.

Why Liberalism Failed may be the first book that I have ever read twice out of a sense of intellectual frustration. I do not know the books author, Patrick Deneen, so nothing about it is personal. The frustration I feel is philosophical and political, and it is complicated. Why Liberalism Failed is about the state of the modern political order, and it is one of those books that I feel acutely qualified to judge. Like Patrick Deneen, I have a Ph.D. in political theory. So I have thought a lot about modern liberalism, have often sympathized with its critics, and I agree with some of Deneens basic arguments and diagnostics. But I can also see that his work is sloppy in its causal attributions, overweening and lopsided in its analysis of current affairs, and dogmatic about the future of constitutional democracy. As a work of scholarship, Deneens 2018 book is a disappointment. It contains clumsy interpretations of major philosophical thinkers and eras and sometimes his political arguments do not rise to the level that I would expect from good students. Why Liberalism Failed was published by an academic press, but for me it was just one big troll.

None of this would matter much if the book were about something unimportant, or if it hadnt gotten much attention, or if the world around us today were different than it is. Unfortunately, the book is about the status and future of modern liberal democracy, it has had a tremendous amount of attention in the two years since its publication, and Deneen has now become part of a global reactionary moment. The book was reviewed extremely widely and even made it onto Obamas 2018 reading list. Deneens status rose accordingly, and he has since become a fixture on the new nationalist and reactionary Right. In March 2019, he signed on to a First Things letter that celebrated the end of the pre-Trump conservative establishment. He attended the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in the summer of 2019 and visited with Viktor Orbn in Hungary last fall. Unlike other staunch conservatives like David French and Rod Dreher, he does not speak out against the Trumpy GOP on social media. He is also an open supporter of something like Adrian Vermeule-style Integralism (Vermeule has recently been appointed to the American Conference of the United States, or ACUS, by the president). His mode of thinking is representative of a broadly-entertained hope for a new fusionism of social conservatism and populist working-class economics on the American right (among those whom I would classify as reactionary conservatives, Deneen stands out for his economic leftism/aggressive opposition to capitalism).

To be clear, I do not believe that the fusionist hope is necessarily illiberal or reactive, insofar as I believe you can hold deeply socially conservative views, as well as pro-working-class economic views, while still working to uphold others rights (and even while disagreeing with the character or scope of particular rights). I characterize Deneen as illiberal and reactionary because his work regularly makes vague, backward-looking appeals to the past, and he abandons the idea of liberal rights (or at least fails to delineate the scope of his rejection of rights with any clarity). My sense is that Deneens work has, in tandem with that of many others on the anti-liberal Right, helped pave the way for the emergence of populist, illiberal authoritarianism as a serious political force in the United States. Although at this point I do trust that Trump will leave the White House in January 2021, the reactionary outlook is not just going to disappear. It has gained a foothold in the United States and is on the rise around the world.

So I have spent some time looking at Deneens book more closely than can be done in a standard book review in this series of commentaries for Niskanen. I think this is worth doing because Deneens book is the most serious defense Ive seen of illiberal conservatism, and as such it offers a useful window into some of the conditions that made Trump possible (and are likely to sustain the GOP moving forward). The book also resonated with people like Barack Obama and Cornel West because it got some things right, and it would be a mistake to ignore those insights.

Furthermore, Deneens book goes wrong in ways that are instructive. Deneens main claim throughout the book I call it his inevitability thesis is that modern liberal democracy has failed because it has been too true to its deepest commitment of radical individual autonomy, which necessarily acts like a solvent on the social fabric. Deneen repeats his thesis all the way through the book, a bit like a wizard, and everything in turn serves this insight: liberalism is about individualism, which leads to collapse, which leads to despotic government; wash, rinse, repeat. The biggest problem with the book, as I see it, is that the inevitability thesis simply isnt true. Radical individual autonomy is not the essence of liberal democracy properly understood, and so theres not much that is inevitable about rampant individualism wielding destructive power throughout the modern world. All political life involves a complicated interplay of individual freedom, collective concerns and aspirations, material conditions, and other historical contingencies. Yet Deneen wants us to believe that, thanks to some early modern ideas about individuals and nature, there is only one direction for modern constitutionalism to go. In other words, his book takes us down a long tunnel of providential doom, but along the way, he is the one quietly closing the doors and windows that might lead to alternative (liberal, constitutional) futures and possibilities. Since Deneens mode of thinking is representative of something important within conservative thought today, its useful to call out these mistakes, these closures, and these exclusions to stop and say No, this isnt true, and that isnt how it works. Lets think about how things might be otherwise.

In the series, I focus on three areas where Deneen (and some of the other reactionaries who have gained traction in recent years) go wrong in ways that matter. In this first post, I call attention to Deneens use of the language of liberalism and articulate a few major interpretive errors, as well as some of the things that I think he gets right. In Part 2, I take on a major methodological flaw that characterizes reactionary conservatism more generally: the lack of serious historical standards for political judgment, which, in its interplay of dystopianism and fuzzy/unaccountable idealism, amounts to a dangerous evasion of reality. In Part 3, I consider Deneens muddled claims about modern individualism. I discuss his manipulations of theoretical texts and his lopsided account of contemporary political life. In Part 4, I discuss Deneens pinched understanding of liberal education and freedom. I conclude in Part 5 with a consideration of the dangers I see lurking in Deneens way of thinking and that I worry Republicans and conservatives have still been too slow to acknowledge. I also recommend some antidotes to Deneenism.

I want to begin by highlighting something simple but important about Deneens book, which is the way that he uses the language of liberalism. Deneens title boldly declares that liberalism has failed, but what exactly does he mean, and is it true? Unfortunately for the average American reader, Deneen makes adjudicating such questions more difficult than it needs to be through his sloppy linguistic choices. Political labels always pose problems (What is the difference between a social democrat and a democratic socialist? How are todays liberals and socialists distinct?), but when it comes to simple clarity and consistency of meaning, in an American context, the word liberalism is especially problematic. The word is extremely vague and varying. It means one thing to Putin, and another to Trump; an American on the far left will use the word disparagingly to describe the center, while conservatives and much of the mainstream use it as a catch-all for the American left. It almost always carries a highly partisan valence. It is unfortunate that, from the get-go, Deneen chooses a word that often confounds more than it clarifies.

In the introduction to his book, Deneen does explain that he means liberalism in the very broadest, theoretical sense. When he speaks of liberalism, Deneen explains on pages 1 and 2, he is talking about the modern liberal democratic order the system of representative government that gradually gained authority throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and that now characterizes democratic life in much of the world. In other words, Deneen claims to be using the word as American political theorists often do, to describe modern, multiracial, constitutional democracy. Since the book is written for a general audience, a more transparent title would have been Why Liberal Democracy Failed, or Why Modern Liberal Constitutionalism Failed. The claim implicit in Deneens title is that the American Founding has amounted to a failure, and it implies that all liberal democracies in the world are headed that same way. This book is supposed to be about an entire regime type, and to have very little to do with the American left vs. right.

But one significant implication of Deneens title, and his use of highly-charged liberalism and its cognates throughout the book (he ends up blaming the ascendant liberalocracy for a good share of Americas problems), is that it allows him to tap into all the pent-up anti-Democratic, anti-liberal partisanship of the American right (and left), while dodging and concealing the radical, reactionary nature of his claims. Whether it was intentional or not, this seems to me like a highly-charged political choice dressed up as scholarly objectivity and one that is often replicated throughout the media, especially on the right, to the detriment of discourse and institutions. For the sake of clarity, whenever possible I try to stick to the term liberal democracy or constitutional democracy.

I am not the first to argue that Why Liberalism Failed lacks scholarly integrity (as political scientist Alan Wolfe put it in his review of the book, Deneens work is unrestrained by any hint of academic caution), but I would like to back up such a charge right away by briefly highlighting a few places where Deneens philosophical interpretations strike me as off-base. The first two have to do with Deneens claims about the relationship between nature and culture, and the last has to do with his reading of Tocqueville.

One of Deneens key claims is that liberal democracy is based on a strictly antagonistic relationship to the natural world and that the liberal idea of organizing people into stable, law-governed societies corresponds to aggressive modern efforts to conquer nature. There is certainly some truth to this claim, as the empirical history of capitalism, chattel slavery, imperialism, and resource exploitation demonstrate. But Deneen strips this history of nuance or ambiguity and oversimplifies both pre-liberal and modern views about the relationship between nature and society.

Take, for example, Deneens treatment of the philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1625). I am not surprised that Deneen disagrees with elements of Bacons thought, but I am surprised by his slapdash characterizations of Bacon, who was by any measure a serious thinker who helped to lay the foundations for modern science. In the introduction to his book, Deneen offers this quick summary of Bacons outlook: Francis Bacon who rejected classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and justice, arguing instead that knowledge is power compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets (14). I do not know where Deneen got the idea that Francis Bacon had no interest in cultivating virtues like wisdom, prudence, and justice, given that one of Bacons most famous works is a collection of moral essays that considers some of these themes, and another, called The Wisdom of the Ancients, offers a re-telling of ancient Greek mythology for young people. Bacon and Deneen would probably disagree about the character of ancient virtue and wisdom, but Bacon was clearly inspired by the ancient world; he was a quintessential Renaissance Man.

And even just as a characterization of how Bacon thought about nature, Deneens claim is deeply misleading. Francis Bacon wrote several significant works about science and knowledge that attacked the contemporary status quo. He was writing at a time where universities were dominated by scholasticism a mode of understanding the world that drew on both classical and theological traditions, and which, in Bacons view, tended to rely too much on metaphysical abstractions. In works like The New Organon and The Advancement of Learning, Bacon advocated for a renewal of ancient (with an interest in pre-Socratic) questioning, combined with his own new ideas about experimentation and scientific induction. While it is true that Bacon sometimes speaks of torturing nature to reveal her secrets, his metaphors at other times signal a deep appreciation for natures mysteries, dynamism, and potential. One great example of this comes early on in The New Organon, where Bacon describes his vision for the future of science. Having just described his hopes that thinkers and scientists will work to understand their own human biases (or idols), he explains:

[Once we have] clarified the part played by the nature of things and the part played by the nature of the mind, we believe that, with the help of Gods goodness, we will have furnished and adorned the bedchamber for the marriage of the mind and the universe. In the wedding hymn we should pray that men may see born from this union the assistants that they need and a lineage of discoveries which may in some part conquer and subdue the misery and poverty of man.

Bacon was not merely interested in torturing nature to discover her secrets, as Deneen repeatedly alleges. He was interested in understanding and interpreting the world, and in discovering the causes of things in the hopes of alleviating human suffering. He even entertained hopes that modern people might explore new ways of living and being together. The legacy of the so-called modern scientific project is complicated and fraught, but when Deneen reduces Bacons efforts to an aggressive seizing-upon the natural order, its a falsification. The suggestion that such a posture defines early modern thinking more generally is laughable (just think of Rousseau).

Given how much Deneens inevitability thesis depends on early modern thinkers having a single ideological outlook and program, it is troubling that Deneen would mischaracterize Bacons views. Still,it is perhaps understandable, or at least its a very human thing to do. What is more surprising to me is how Deneen misreads pre-liberal thinkers. For example, at one point Deneen argues that, whereas all versions of liberalism betray a fundamental commitment to the severance of nature from culture, for pre-liberal humanity, even the possibility of a divide between these two would have been incomprehensible (67-8). Deneen suggests that pre-liberal thinkers did not think in terms of nature vs. nurture and that they understood the two basically to be symbiotic. His aim throughout this section of the book is to show that liberal modernity destroys culture by severing it from its natural roots. According to Deneen, in the pre-liberal world, culture was understood as the flourishing culmination of a natural order, whereas the moderns believed culture to be something artificial, distinct, and therefore of questionable value (as he puts it a few pages later: a core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits human nature 72).

Now, as a characterization of the modern view, this is a vast oversimplification (my own view is that the early moderns were aiming to break free of a totalizing theological culture, not from culture as such; they used the wedge of natural science partly as a way of opening up a path to other broader cultural inquiry and renewal). But in the course of making his point Deneen has also said something that is badly off about pre-liberal thinking. Not only does ancient thought (and here I limit myself just to the ancient Greeks) recognize a distinction between nature and nurture (an anachronistic linguistic distinction, but one that tracks roughly on to the Greeks physis/nomos), ancient thinkers were deeply committed to investigating this difference. The ancient Greeks sought to understand what accounts for differences across different conventions or forms of nurture; they worked to adjudicate different norms and customs according to more and less natural standards. They also carefully weighed the extent to which human cultures should strive to shape individual souls in more or less natural ways. While it is true that ancient philosophers often thought about both nature and culture in teleological terms (i.e., they argued that conventions/culture emerge in accordance with a natural order), they also regularly challenged and interrogated that pat way of understanding of the world, exposing its metaphysical and practical limits. Platos Republic is largely a meditation on the question of whether any human culture (or cave) is or should ever be made to be compatible with either the true common good or the natural expression of individuals innate capacities and potential. Aristotles corpus is full of radical questions about what it means to have a nature, and about how natural human flourishing relates to better and worse social conventions and relationships. Even Homer is interested in how human beings are shaped by more or less humane conventions, and there is no simple, more natural, answer. To suggest that the nature/nurture distinction did not exist in the pre-liberal world is to be closed to what is most interesting in ancient philosophy and literature.

I take my final brief example of Deneens sloppy writing from his account of Tocqueville, a writer that he clearly admires and takes seriously. Deneen appeals to Tocqueville repeatedly in Why Liberalism Failed, and he makes his overall interpretation of Tocqueville more explicit in a response to some critics that came out in Commonweal magazine last year. The disagreement hinges on the question of the inevitability of liberal democratic decay. In the course of chiding his interlocutors for their optimistic reading of Tocqueville, Deneen argues that Tocqueville insisted that democracy followed an inexorable logic toward toward individualism, materialism, restlessness, short-term thinking, and a kind of civic infantilism fostered by a tutelary state. According to Deneen, Tocqueville held that liberal democracy acts as a destructive scourge even on the sources of renewal that he [Tocqueville] identifies and delineates (each of these remedies is subject to liberal democracys corrosive logic). In other words, Deneens Tocqueville always believed the very same thing that Deneen does namely, in a fixed and inexorable determinism that renders democracys downfall inevitable.

Now, regardless of ones judgment of democracy in America today and granting the premise that we should care what Tocqueville thought as a reading of Tocqueville, this is incoherent. For all of his pessimism, Tocqueville very clearly admired, and hoped to foster, genuine political liberty and agency within a democratizing world. Deneen insists that liberalism cannot sustain and reconstitute itself, but Tocqueville tried to do this very thing through his inquiries, arguments, and haunting rhetorical appeals. It is true that both volumes of Democracy in America conclude in pessimism volume one with a devastating chapter about the three races in America, and volume two with a harsh warning about soft despotism and tyranny. These are stirring readings, to be sure, but that doesnt make them equivalent to fatalistic swan songs. Given that Tocqueville describes himself throughout his life as a friend of liberty and of America (as well as, at one point, the persevering enemy of despotism everywhere), it is more sensible to read the tragic passages as questioning appeals to latent and perhaps as yet unknown democratic possibilities. And though it is true that, later in life, as an older man, in private letters, Tocqueville expresses further doubts about Americas democratic prospects, that shift is a response to specific historical changes and transformations, not a pronouncement for all time. Against this rich Tocquevillian backdrop, Deneens claims about liberal democracys inevitable decline is a rigid and unfortunate projection.

The argument about inevitable decline also fails to account for any of the vast, if lurching, improvements that American democracy has enjoyed since Tocquevilles day starting, I guess it bears repeating, with hard-earned rights and freedoms for Black Americans and for women. According to Deneens reasoning, America is worse-off as a political state than it was in Tocquevilles day (i.e., since before the Civil War). Maybe this is what he believes. My own view is that, as others have noted, in history things usually get better and worse at the same time. Deneen doesnt tell us much about how he gauges the difference between better and worse, even while he proclaims liberal modernity a failure. I say more about his failure to provide substantive historical evaluative standards in Part 2.

I would not bother pointing out these bad interpretative moves on Deneens part if I did not think it mattered for how we understand the world today. After all, its not just Bacon, the ancient Greeks, and Tocqueville that Deneen gets wrong, and its not just Deneen who makes such unequivocal judgments. The projections he makes onto these texts match the pattern of what he and other reactionaries read into the world. Again and again, they mishandle and mislead.

One of the reasons I find reading Deneen so frustrating is that, despite my disagreement with his thesis, I do agree with some of his basic claims about current affairs in the United States. I agree, for example, with Deneens critique of capitalisms excesses. I agree with the idea that, absent cultural restraints, human desire is basically without limit and that this is a problem because we live on a finite planet. I appreciate his willingness to step up as a conservative voice for environmental conservation and sustainability.

I also agree with significant portions of Deneens assessment of modern culture and am fond of his formulation of the twin depletions of nature and culture. I agree with Deneen that too often people in modern liberal democracies disavow or disregard the kinds of activities and civic modes that could help people contend responsibly with rapid social and technological transformations, and, like Deneen, I am troubled by the eclipse of the humanities and liberal arts in our universities by STEM. Like Deneen (and Wendell Berry), I enjoy thinking about what culture can do for people (and for life more generally), as opposed to focusing on how it necessarily constitutes an oppressive force. Heres a passage where Deneen says something thoughtful about culture: Preserved in discrete human inheritances arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment (77). I am sure that my definition of what counts as a cultural inheritance is different from Deneens and I discuss this important difference in Part 4 but Deneen is right that cultural artifacts and institutions can be powerful resources for reflection and transformation, and I think we would do well to acknowledge this more often.

I also like aspects of Deneens solution to our political crisis quite a bit. Deneen makes an open-ended appeal to grassroots community-building (what he calls the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy, 20) as a way of moving forward in the wake of liberalisms supposed failure. In the course of his conclusion, Deneen makes the case for a kind of political retreat and renewal, hoping that we might build new, alternative communities and practices outside the gathering wreckage of liberalisms twilight years. Unfortunately, thanks to his highly rigid ideological framework which posits that liberal democracy cannot operate in tandem with genuine community Deneens alternative communities lack basic protections against political domination and abuses of power (see pages 196-197; I discuss Deneens anti-political streak in Part 3). Apart from that, the appeal to local communities and cultures strikes me as altogether appropriate. I also like some of his specific policy ideas about how to achieve greater socioeconomic diversity and a more genuinely mixed regime (as he outlined them in an otherwise pretty odd speech on Aristopopulism at Catholic University in March 2019, where, among other things, he advocates using punitive Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends).

For someone on the left, there is quite a bit to like in what Patrick Deneen has to say. He is astute when it comes to the dangers of capitalism, as well as on environmental questions indeed, at times, his arguments parallel those of Naomi Klein or others further left on the spectrum. Overall, and for reasons that I hope will become clearer in the course of the series, I think Samuel Moyn had it right when he argues that Deneens book is more about the failure of neoliberalism and libertarianism than of modern liberal constitutionalism, and suggests that the challenge for us today is to revive the latter and pursue it in its most persuasive guises. Deneen is awfully dismissive towards that suggestion a reflection, I think, of just how wedded he is to his tale of lamentation and woe.

In the end, though, I think Moyn and other critics are perhaps too charitable towards Deneen. Throughout his analysis, Patrick Deneen adopts the pretense of performing a scholarly postmortem on an entire class of regime that is still very much in existence all around the world; my sense is that hes more like an active cheerleader for decline. In other words, Deneen pretends to be objective, but his book preaches anti-liberalism. In writing it, he breaches many liberal (and not just liberal) intellectual presuppositions of honesty, fair-mindedness, and transparency. I do not know whether Deneen breaches these standards knowingly, or whether his ideological blinders are just so thick that he has lost his intellectual compass.

The suggestion that Deneen is so illiberal/authoritarian that he would manipulate and massage arguments to serve illiberal ends ought not scandalize anyone who has followed him on social media, or listened to his speech on Aristopopulism, and so who understands how seriously he appears to take his own project. The same goes for fellow-travelers like Adrian Vermeule (whose writings strategize about a religious takeover of modern bureaucracies, and who sees Deneen as advocating for integralism from within), or Sohrab Ahmari (who has officially given up on the idea of civil discourse, and preaches a politics of war and enmity instead), or Bill Barr (who likes to refer to folks on the left as fanatical totalitarians).It seems to me that Deneens book takes advantage of readers good faith (and of liberal good faith in particular). Why Liberalism Failed is not, at bottom, a scholarly book. It is a political screed swathed in academic prestige. As someone who believes in constitutional democracy, I think this concern is worth articulating clearly. I hope readers will consider all five parts of this series and judge for themselves.

It seems to me that Deneens book takes advantage of readers good faith (and of liberal good faith in particular). Why Liberalism Failed is not, at bottom, a scholarly book. It is a political screed swathed in academic prestige. As someone who believes in constitutional democracy, I think this concern is worth articulating clearly. I hope readers will consider all five parts of this series and judge for themselves.

Go here to read the rest:

Revisiting Why Liberalism Failed Part 1: The Intellectual and Political Stakes - Niskanen Center

By Laura K. Field

This is part 2 of a 5-part series. Read the full series here.

Some 30 years ago, Francis Fukuyama famously declared liberal democracy to be singularly ascendant. Two years ago Patrick Deneen declared it defunct. Who is closer to the truth?

A lot has happened in global politics since the early 1990s, much of it very bad, some of it very good. In my adult lifetime Ive seen ongoing environmental exploitation, the Iraq War, the rise of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration; Ive also seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the taming of HIV/AIDS, and major strides in clean energy (just to count a few things that Deneen and I would surely agree are good). But the story Deneen tells, and that other reactionaries like Michael Anton and Bill Barr seem to agree with, is one of simple long-term decline. By Deneens telling, the social and political foundations of all modern liberal democracies have at some point along the way, hard to tell when shifted dramatically, and only for the worse. I imagine that one of the reasons that Why Liberalism Failed proved so popular is that it takes such a single-minded view, but it is a strange set of distortions concerning an obviously complicated trajectory. In this section I consider some of these distortions systematically.

Deneens work begins with a reductive definition of liberalism that cherry-picks within liberal democracys rich genealogy. He focuses on individualism and the conquest of nature, and jettisons more standard hallmarks of liberalism. Then, as he sets out to answer the question posed by his title i.e., to explain why it is that liberalism failed Deneen tells a lopsided story that romanticizes the past and is decidedly dystopian about the present. The book fails to articulate any clear standard by which we might reasonably adjudicate political realities, and ends with hazy appeals to localism and community. Deneens concluding chapter actively avoids theoretical clarity and leaves the door to localized authoritarianism and theocracy wide-open. All in all, the methodology here leaves something to be desired.

I have written before about Patrick Deneens narrow understanding of liberal democracy and, in particular, how he and others tend to lean on old neutralist conceptions of liberalism that were popular in the 1980s as a way of undercutting the normative heart of liberalism (which is not merely about individualism, but also about freedom of conscience, dignity, and the cultivation of peace and well-being, among other things). Here I want to begin by saying something more straightforward about Deneens overall approach about how, when it comes to testing and proving his central causal claim about decline, he dodges engagement with some of the most obvious variables.

Deneen is a political theorist, not a political scientist, and I do not mean to imply that he should have written a book of political science research (as Jason Blakely has observed in his work on Adrian Vermeule, its quite possible to use the sober findings of social sciences as a cloak for dangerous/authoritarian ideas). But the social sciences aside, Deneens big thesis is that liberalism failed because it became the victim of its own success (Liberalism would thus simultaneously prevail and fail by becoming more nakedly itself, xiii; liberalism has failed not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it succeeded, 3). Presumably, in accounting for this kind of causal claim X became more itself, thus causing its own decline the definition one begins with matters. To understand whether liberal democracy caused its own decline, by virtue of its true nature or essence, we need to know what that essence really is. Unfortunately, when Deneen settles on a definition of liberalism, he does so reductively and idiosyncratically, and in a manner that evades standard conceptions of what liberal democracy actually involves. In other words, Deneen argues that liberalism fails by being too much itself too atomistic, too unnatural but these things hardly constitute liberalisms telos or core.

As a theorist it is always difficult to establish stable definitions (as Blakely puts it, liberalism should be thought of more like a literary genre, with new forms and innovations continually emerging). But still, in the opening pages of his book, Deneen himself provides us with just such a standard definition of liberalism. He identifies limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections as some of the hallmarks of liberalism (1-2). This strikes me as a reasonable list. In her book, The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt shows how many of liberalisms earliest defenders came to a similar standardized conception, emphasizing equality before the law, constitutional and representative government, and freedom of the press, conscience, and trade (62, see also 71). So, while the history of the word has shifted around in complicated ways since then, Deneens hallmarks constitute a decent working definition of the thing. It seems reasonable to expect that the hallmarks of a thing would be among its defining features, such that, according to Deneens thesis, the hallmarks of liberalism would be among the things that, by becoming more truly themselves, would also contribute to the supposed failure. Unfortunately, the book does not address the successes and failures of the actual hallmarks of liberalism in any systematic way. Deneen does not dare to argue that by establishing things like limited government, equality before the law, free and fair elections, independent courts, etc., society tends to unravel.

Instead, Deneen pivots early on away from a standard conception of liberal democracy and draws his own alternative portrait. According to Deneen, liberalism proper is animated not by its hallmark features or standard attributes or aspirations, but by two foundational beliefs. Undergirding every liberal state is a radical belief in anthropological individualism and in the human separation from and opposition to nature (31). With this, Deneen reconstructs and redefines liberal democracy in a way that minimizes the role played by political structures and protections. He refocuses on two alleged ideological positions, which, in turn, threaten everything else: These foundational liberal ideologies have already turned politics, government, economics, and education into the iron cages of our captivity. In addition to shifting attention to an allegedly all-powerful ideology, Deneen also makes quick work of the hallmarks of liberalism by suggesting that they were actually not liberal at all, but rather the inheritances of other pre-liberal traditions and legacies:

Many of the institutional forms of government that we today associate with liberalism were at least initially conceived and developed over long centuries preceding the modern age, including constitutionalism, separation of powers, separate spheres of church and state, rights and protections against arbitrary rule, federalism, rule of law, and limited government. Protection of rights of individuals and the belief in inviolable human dignity, if not always consistently recognized and practiced, were nevertheless philosophical achievements of premodern medieval Europe. (22)

One might quibble here about the relative importance of philosophical versus actual achievements, but even granting that Deneen is correct about the genealogy of liberalisms hallmark institutions, a mixed-up lineage hardly diminishes the ontological integrity of a thing. My children have grandparents and parents, but they are still their own little beings. When Deneen reduces liberal democracy to two ideological flashpoints, to the exclusion of its other signature inheritances and innovations, its a manipulative, anti-historical projection. As Samuel Goldman observes in his review of Why Liberalism Failed, Deneens account of liberalism amounts to a theoretical just so story, or Geistesgeschichte: It reaches back into the past to explain why things must be exactly as we find them today, without acknowledging nonintellectual factors, contingency, and just plain chance.

But this stunted set-up is necessary to the bigger story that unfolds. Deneen is only able to make a plausible case for liberalisms self-destructiveness once he has reduced the tradition, deconstructed it and defined it down. After all, if radical individualism and opposition to nature were the true essence of liberal constitutionalism, then it would in all likelihood necessarily falter (and to the extent that Deneens work is useful, its because it depicts that possibility so glaringly). A more serious and honest assessment of modern liberal democracy would not jettison its hallmarks in favor of theoretical perversions.

A second major methodological problem with Deneens work is that his evaluative standards remain almost entirely opaque. Deneens title confidently declares liberal modernity a failure, but against what standard does he render this bold judgment? When were things really much better? For Deneen (much as with Trumps MAGA-loving supporters), the answer to this question seems to be before. But instead of demonstrating any kind of clear and precipitous change from better to failed historical conditions, Deneen proceeds unsystematically. His introduction begins with some lazy, citation-free references to public opinion (70% of Americans believe; It is evident to all that; A growing chorus of voices even warn that), and then proceeds primarily via hyperbolic assertions about the present. The book is full of nostalgic reminiscences about the past, but he leaves it up to the reader to intuit the actual standard against which he makes his central empirical claim.

Here is a sampling of what Deneen has to say about the present in the course of his 2018 introduction:

Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. (2)

The limited government of liberalism today would provoke jealousy and amazement from tyrants of old, who could only dream of such extensive capacities for surveillance and control of movement, finances, and even deeds and thoughts. The liberties that liberalism was brought into being to protect individual rights of conscience, religion, association, speech, and self-governance are extensively compromised by the expansion of government activity into every area of life. (7)

Our electoral process today appears more to be a Potemkin drama meant to convey the appearance of popular consent for a figure who will exercise incomparable arbitrary powers over domestic policy, international arrangements, and, especially, war-making. (8)

There has always been, and probably always will be, economic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail. (9)

Todays liberals condemn a regime that once separated freeman from serf, master from slave, citizen from servant, but even as we have ascended to the summit of moral superiority over our benighted forebears by proclaiming everyone free, we have almost exclusively adopted the educational form that was reserved for those who were deprived of freedom. (13)

Already these early assertions tell us quite a bit about Deneens evaluative standards. First off, his condemnation of liberal democratic life is meant to be world-historical: things are about as bad now as they have ever been anywhere. Furthermore, Deneen situates contemporary America right down with the truly retrograde regimes when it comes to basic politics, economics, and education. Americans are worse off today in terms of basic freedoms than citizens were under the tyrannies of old. American elections are a farce, and the U.S. government today exerts incomparable arbitrary powers over its citizenry. Present-day America is more debased than almost any other civilization in terms of its economic inequalities. And our educational system approximates that which was formerly reserved for slaves and serfs. The hyperbole continues unabated through later chapters, where Deneen will allude, for example, to our flattened cultural wasteland, our blighted cultural landscape, and the gathering wreckage of liberalisms twilight years.

I do not have an especially sunny view of American democracy. There are signs of corruption all around, and some of the problems that Deneen describes concerning surveillance, executive power, technology, and inequality strike me as altogether serious and real. But even granting all that, Deneens totalizing pessimism bespeaks, I think, a serious failure of judgment.

On Deneens adjudicatory scale, America today is about as bad as it gets. But what constitutes his positive standard? If liberalism has failed and America is so bad, has it ever been decent or good? Is there some clear ideal or good against which Deneen makes these extraordinary adjudications?

These seem like the kind of questions that a book like Deneens should answer clearly, but instead he is simply inconsistent. On the one hand, he concedes at the beginning of the book that liberalism has been a wildly successful wager (2), and insists throughout that there there can be no return and no restoration (18), that there is no idyllic pre-liberal age to which we might appeal or hope to return (184). On the other hand, the book is chock-full of vague nostalgia and idealistic appeals to the past. He speaks, for example, of how the Roman and the medieval Christian philosophical traditions retained the Greek emphasis upon the cultivation of virtue as a defense against tyranny, and of how ancient institutions sought to check individual power. He speaks of how the idea of individual rights and dignity originated in pre-modern medieval Europe (22), and of how in older times, each generation was taught to consult the great works of our tradition, the epics, the great tragedies and comedies, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the revealed word of God, the countless books that sought to teach us how to use our liberty well (115). According to Deneen, these ancient and Christian influences used to play an important role in American life, until some point in the vague but not-so-distant past:

Americans for much of their history were Burkeans in practice, living in accordance with custom, basic morals, norms. You should respect authority, beginning with your parents. You should display modest and courteous comportment. You should avoid displays of lewdness or titillation. You should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once married, you should stay married. You should have children generally, lots of them. You should live within your means. You should thank and worship the lord. You should pay respect to the elderly and remember and acknowledge your debts to the dead. (147)

Before the collapse of the liberal arts and the redefinition of liberty in this country, Americans lived according to discipline and self-control; they had more gratitude, wisdom, self-restraint, modesty, and honesty, as well as better norms of courtship (39). Deneen doesnt deign to specify a timeframe for this charming epoch, but given his emphasis on sexual customs it seems fair to presume that the collapse happened in the 60s and the 70s i.e., a period which also involved a massive expansion of education and civil rights in this country.

Deneen clearly prefers the ancient to the modern world, and Americas genteel past to its more democratized present. And though intellectually he surely recognizes that, for whole swaths of the population, the past wasnt very rosy at all, he clearly yearns for those bygone days.

One result of Deneens wonky historical sense is that, in addition to the dystopianism, a vague and dislocated idealism pervades the book an implicit high standard against which he condemns the present, but which he cant satisfactorily find in the past, and so resolutely refuses to clarify.

This lack of concreteness and clarity this romantic nostalgia and flight from reality is also clearly manifest in Deneens proposed remedy for contemporary ailments. In some respects Deneens proposal is quite concrete and tangible: He calls for a retreat from individualism and national obsessions, and a renewed focus on local forms of community and communal practices. Channeling republican thinkers from ancient Greece to Tocqueville, Deneen invokes ideals of classical household economics, traditions of self-government and small-polis living, and a renewed attention to the ritualistic forms that shape most human cultures (practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded within virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life). All of this sounds fine, and its easy enough to imagine what he means: We should support local shops, engage in handiwork, make music together, join a church and the PTA. I have nothing much to say against this. I would love to see local forms of community, care, and connectedness flourish. Its also worth noting that many people on the social justice and environmental left have been making this kind of appeal (and cultivating these kinds of changes) for decades.

The problem, as I see it, is that even while Deneen makes his case for localism, he simultaneously decries the idea of governance (reducing it to corrupt liberalocratic statism). Which is to say that the localist solution Deneen proposes in his book is quite weak and apolitical, and as such arguably not an especially realistic response to the problems of the day, which clearly require coordinated political action and civic engagement throughout various levels of government and society.

More recently, Deneen has all-but conceded this point in his work on Aristopopulism, and by acknowledging at least on Twitter, in a since-deleted tweet that localism needs to be part of a two-pronged approach that is supplemented by Adrian Vermeules big-state, heavy-handed illiberal constitutionalism (also known as integralism). This is a troubling development insofar as it is in obvious contradiction with Deneens own critique of Obama-style/Democratic statism: the despotic and tyrannical nature of the modern state constitutes a major part of Deneens despairing ideology (which I discuss at greater length in the next section), but clearly that critique only cuts in one direction. Furthermore, in Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen introduces the idea of local autocracies and theocracies, and then fails to reject the idea that this kind of local government overreach would be cause for concern:

Calls for restoration of culture and the liberal arts, restraints upon individualism and statism, and limits upon liberalisms technology will no doubt prompt suspicious questions. Demands will be made for comprehensive assurances that inequalities and injustice arising from racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudice be preemptively forestalled and that local autocracies or theocracies be legally prevented. Such demands have always contributed to the extension of liberal hegemony, accompanied by simultaneous self-congratulation that we are freer and more equal than ever, even as we are more subject to the expansion of both the state and market, and less in control of our fate. (196-197)

This passage, tucked in towards the end of Deneens book, is a moment where we glimpse the radical character of Deneens anti-liberal critique. Deneen never does say much about what his kind of localism would mean in the context of actual American constitutional law, which aspires to strong protections against autocratic power and theocracy, and (at least in theory) protects citizens from local community overreach. Rather than clarifying this point, Deneen expresses a vague hope that new political theories will emerge out of new forms of community practice. It seems clear that he would rather see local autocracies or theocracies installed than admit that liberal government including a large, democratically-empowered federal bureaucracy is sometimes about more than raw, unaccountable power. And, again, it is striking that Deneen does not seem to have similar concerns about the integralist project.

Setting that contradiction aside, the basic point is that Deneens treatment of politics is just as confused as his definition of liberalism and his disjointed historical standards. As Samuel Goldman puts it in his review, Even under post-liberal or post-modern conditions, however, we would still need some notion of how government ought to be set up. This is, I think, a generous understatement. Deneens account of modern government is so cynical that its hard to see on what basis he would ever challenge someone like Trump, and he proffers a political theory that refuses to articulate any limits to (local) authorities.

Whereas notions like Fukuyamas end of history can be a source of complacency and acquiescence, Deneen opens the door to a volatile and deeply unaccountable sort of political life.

Originally posted here:

Revisiting Why Liberalism Failed Part 2: Distorted Methods, Disorienting History - Deneen on the Past, Present, and Future - Niskanen Center

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By directing the donations to accounts for federal campaigns, the money became subject to the notoriously lax federal laws under which there are no donation caps and a company or individual can pour in up to $14,300 without having to disclose it publicly.

Under the Andrews government's 2018 law, Victorian political donations are in effect capped at $1040 per year, and must be disclosed.

In his evidence to IBAC in late 2019, Mr Woodman conceded his payments to Enterprise Victoria were split to avoid disclosure and media scrutiny. "I guess it was because of the publicity that we had, he said.

IBAC heard how Mr Woodman also split his payments to Labors fundraising arm Progressive Business.

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Ms Sullivan's admission came after IBAC heard a secretly recorded telephone conversation from February 2019 in which she offered Mr Woodman a meeting with Victorian Liberal leaders Michael O'Brien and Robert Clark at the same time as she sought donations. She also talked of a loophole to sidestep donation laws.

Both Mr O'Brien and Mr Clark insist that no meeting occurred with Mr Woodman.

The Victorian Electoral Act states that a person must not enter into, or carry out, a scheme with the intention of circumventing a prohibition or requirement under the act. The penalty is up to 10 years imprisonment.

On its face, there appears to be a breach of this prohibition by the practice of Enterprise Victoria wholly channelling money it received to its federal election campaign account so as to avoid the application of Victorian political funding laws, said Professor Joo-Cheong Tham of the Melbourne Law School, an expert on integrity and political finance.

It remains unclear how, or if, political parties really quarantine federal from state accounts in practice. Liberal Party director Sam McQuestin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A Victorian Electoral Commission spokeswoman said it was watching IBACs investigation with interest and would support the anti-corruption watchdog wherever possible. This includes receiving any matters that may be referred by IBAC at the conclusion of its investigation.

The February 2019 recorded conversation came after The Sunday Age in late 2018 raised concerns about potential corruption at Casey Council and Mr Woodman's use of donations to influence state MPs.

John Woodman and his client stood to gain $150 million from a rezoning, and was willing to spend big money to secure it.Credit:

The Liberal Party also faces questions about whether Enterprise Victoria is properly registered under Commonwealth law after Ms Sullivan told IBAC she believed Enterprise Victoria was an associated entity.

Federal laws require that an entity controlled by a party or which operates largely to a partys benefit must be registered as an associated entity and account for its revenue and expenditure to the Australian Electoral Commission. Enterprise Victoria is not currently registered as such.

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If Enterprise Victoria is a separate entity, this would likely mean that it is required to register as an associated entity under the Commonwealth Electoral Act," Professor Tham said.

The Liberal Party has not responded to questions about this although party insiders have assured The Age that Enterprise Victoria is a fund-raising brand only and not not a separate legal entity.

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Royce Millar is an investigative journalist at The Age with a special interest in public policy and government decision-making.

Originally posted here:

Liberal Party's fundraising arm might have breached law over political donations - The Age