Trump and the fall of liberalism

I often suggest to my students that liberalism in its political instantiation, for all of its appeal, is so powerful a theory that it probably works better in opposition than in government. Modern liberalism has become what liberal philosophers not long ago would have derided as a “comprehensive view” — a theory that believes itself able to give an account of how every institution of the society should operate, and even, alas, how people should think. Add to that a dash of triumphalism, and you wind up with a government impatient with the tendency of human beings to resist having too much forced on them at once.

What I hope Democrats will learn from this defeat is not that the American people are irredeemably racist, or, as I heard someone say the other night, that all they have to do is wait a few years for millions of senior citizens who vote Republican to die. I hope they won’t spend much time muttering about how the U.S. should now be classed as a failed state or how we have to dump the system because the voters are too stupid to be trusted. I certainly hope they won’t blame their candidate for being centrist and lurch further to the left.

What I hope happens instead is that liberals of the present day rediscover the virtues of the ascendant liberalism of the 1950s through the 1970s that Democrats seem to want to emulate. These virtues included a toleration for disagreement, an effort to avoid reducing complex issues to applause lines, and a fundamental humility as they went about governing. This doesn’t mean the old-style liberals didn’t believe, earnestly, that they were right on the issues. But they accepted that their nation was a diverse place, that their opponents were entitled to their say, that government should not try to do everything at once, and that policy should be made in a way that could create a working consensus.