Tag: liberalism
Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism
“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing
Marty Peretz and the Travails of American Liberalism
Books & the Arts
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May 14, 2024
Marty Peretz and the travails of American liberalism.
From his New Left days to his neoliberalism and embrace of interventionism, The Controversialist is a portrait of his own political trajectory and that of American liberalism too.
Martin Peretz (R) and then–New Republic editor Hendrick Hertzberg, 1984.
(Cynthia Johnson / Getty)
In 1975, Susan Sontag—the star intellectual of her generation—was forced to confront the fact that she was just another
To Imagine a Better Future, Look to John Rawls
Politics
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April 30, 2024
While we cannot change the world with dreams alone, moral ideas can inspire people to come together and change their societies for the better.
John Rawls in 1987.
(Frederic Reglain / Gammo-Rapho via Getty Images)
Is Liberalism a Politics of Fear?
Before the First World War, to be a liberal typically meant defending universal values and rationalism. Liberals had an optimistic view of human nature and believed in historical progress. The Second World War, the rise of facism, and the mobilization of a global military force to combat Nazism dealt a serious blow to this view. In its aftermath, new threats emerged in the form of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and panic over the prospects of communism spreading around the … Read more
Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty’s Lifelong Argument
Fifty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. vowed not to read another book about liberalism until his mother wrote one. Liberalism was riding high then, and Buckley was probably annoyed by its champions’ triumphalist tone. Over the past four decades, things have changed: You can hardly walk around the block today without tripping over a critique of liberalism. There are critiques by wild-eyed Randians, free-market libertarians, neoclassical economists, neo-Burkean conservatives, Catholic integralists, critical race theorists, postmodernists,
American Authoritarianism Isn’t Going Away
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Francis Fukuyama Plays Defense | The New Yorker
If a neoconservative, as Irving Kristol once quipped, is a liberal mugged by reality, what should we make of Francis Fukuyama? In 1989, when Fukuyama published his landmark essay, “The End of History?,” he was a thirty-six-year-old political-science Ph.D. with a pristine neocon résumé: he had been Allan Bloom’s protégé at Cornell; an analyst for the RAND Corporation, the military-oriented think tank; and an official in both Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s State Departments. The essay, which Fukuyama
The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize
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At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow
John Rawls and Liberalism’s Selective Conscience
In December of 1944, on the Philippine island of Leyte, the soldiers of F Company of the 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, dug in. Stationed just outside the town of Limon, they were attempting to take a strategic ridge overlooking the town. In the face of fierce Japanese resistance, it was all they could do to hold their position. A first lieutenant who was also a Lutheran pastor addressed the company and gave words of encouragement by means of a
George Packer’s Liberal Faith | The Nation
George Packer is one of the most successful long-form journalists of his generation. For more than two decades, he has been among this country’s leading liberal commentators. Offering a political and often personal chronicle of the vicissitudes of American liberalism over the past century, he has sought at once to reclaim and repurpose a political tradition he knows is in crisis.
With each book, the task has gotten harder for him. In