Bad Infinity: The endurance of the liberal imagination. By James Duesterberg
Since the global political unraveling in 2016, liberalism has lost its voice.
From the “basket of deplorables” to the “#resistance” pins to the eat-pray-love
liberalism of “a thousand small sanities,” public defenses of the West’s
regnant political ideology ring hollow and desperate. Read the Times or
the Post, listen to politicians, sit for a second and catch the
mood in the airport: the absence is in the air, not just in our language. Max
Weber called twentieth-century governance the “slow boring of hard boards”:
they have been bored, and so are we.
To literary critics
and political theorists—those whose job it is to front-run the
zeitgeist—liberalism now seems not so much an opponent to battle as a corpse to
put to rest. It is something to be, at most, anatomized, if not simply buried
and forgotten. The new right tends toward the former: Patrick Deneen’s Why
Liberalism Failed, published in 2018 and blurbed by everyone from David
Brooks to Cornel West, blames the very idea of America, with its manic
commitment to a radical and spiritually empty freedom. For millennial
socialists and fully automated luxury communists, liberalism is, instead, a
kind of dad joke, a boomer blooper: faintly embarrassing and best ignored.
Maybe we grew up believing in Obama, but that’s all over; now we’ve grown up
and moved out.
Wake up! critics seem
to say; Get Real. Liberalism is dead. All you have to do is look
around: the world we live in is one our old categories can’t explain. Liberalism
envisions the tools of reason—science, public debate, law—liberating
individuals, tempering passions and leading, however slowly and unevenly, to a
world felicitously governed, in harmony with itself. It is very hard to square
such a vision with the present world, in which governments have been captured
by grifters and demagogues, algorithms move markets and ambient anxiety reigns... read more:
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