In 1972, Irving Kristol noted the striking fact that the New Left seemed to lack a coherent economic critique of the status quo, besides occasional Marxist platitudes borrowed from the Old Left:
The identifying marks of the New Left are its refusal to think economically and its contempt for bourgeois society precisely because this is a society that does think economically.
What really ailed American society, and what the New Left could sense but not articulate, Kristol wrote, was a spiritual malady. Despite the efforts of Burkean conservatives, the “accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy” had been steadily depleting since the French Revolution, and with its depletion, so too society’s abilities to cope with the material inequalities, resentments, and indignities made inevitable by the free exchange of goods and services.
The Islamic political philosopher Ali Shariati had come to a similar conclusion in those same years:
Humanity arrived at liberalism, and took democracy in place of theocracy as its key to liberation. It was snared by a crude capitalism, in which democracy proved as much a delusion as theocracy. Liberalism proved an arena in which the only freedom was for horsemen, vying with one another in raids and plundering.
Frustrated with this “dizzying whirl of personal avarice,” and lacking the pre–French Revolution Protestant ethos that Kristol believed kept the accompanying resentments in check, the disenchanted turned to communism. To Shariati, however, this was no remedy, as communism represents “the same fanatical and frightening power as the Medieval Church” and comes to dominate the same people it claims to liberate.
Shariati’s imagined “third way” between what Kristol called “bourgeois liberalism” and communism was a revived libertarian religious consciousness. For Kristol, it was a rejuvenated American civic nationalism. Neither of these have come to pass—Iran became a brutal theocracy, while bourgeois liberalism sputtered on in the United States, despite occasional moments of religious revival and rarer moments of revived civic nationalism.
Now it seems we are reliving the 60s, with the greatest discontent—at least among the intelligentsia—against bourgeois liberalism in decades. What room is there for liberalism, much less universal liberalism, in a world where the first modern constitutional republic is devouring its liberal norms faster than any enemy could? If the Commission on Unalienable Rights has something to say about it, plenty.
By making room for nationalism, cultural specificity, and state sovereignty, the Draft Report seeks to reclaim the center against two extremes. The first of these is universalist, hegemonic, militant liberalism, of the kind that Hans Morgenthau warned generates a “crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations—in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.” In the realm of international relations, this was the approach embarked half-heartedly by the United States in the unipolar era. In the domestic realm, it is the approach of the militant, iconoclastic left.
The second extreme is classical realpolitik of the kind endorsed by Morgenthau:
For if we look at all nations, our own included, as political entities pursuing their respective interests defined in terms of power, we are able to do justice to all of them. And we are able to do justice to all of them in a dual sense: We are able to judge other nations as we judge our own and, having judged them in this fashion, we are then capable of pursuing policies that respect the interests of other nations, while protecting and promoting those of our own.
In the international realm, this would entail a return to balance of power politics, alliances based on threat calculus and not ideology. This is appealing in a world where unipolarity appears fast fading, where in the People’s Republic of China the United States again faces the kind of existential threat Eisenhower memorably termed a “strongly armed imperialistic dictatorship” in his 1953 State of the Union Address, and where recent attempts to build U.S.-allied democracies in the Middle East have failed. There is no real domestic equivalent of this viewpoint: applied to a single state it would imply a country without any political philosophy at all, no civic nationalism, no national myth, no binding constitution. Only a set of interest groups—racial, ethnic, religious—warring over shares of society’s limited privileges as if they were Ottoman millet representatives in Istanbul. Actually, this is not terribly far from how some neo-Marxists now view American society.
Against these extremes, what is the argument for a moderate approach—one that recognizes unalienable rights that are derived from nature or the divine while acknowledging national sovereignty and self-determination and entailing an ethical and epistemological humility? Reinhold Niebuhr, on the eve of World War II, wrote:
It is because men are sinners that justice can be achieved only by a certain degree of coercion on the one hand, and by resistance to coercion and tyranny on the other hand. The political life of man must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny.
A pure realpolitik would accept the anarchy of the international system and abandon “rights talk,” while liberal interventionism would crusade towards hegemony and likely die trying, especially when under attack at home. Steering the middle path appears wise in these times. Walter Russell Mead calls it an “incendiary centrism,” noting its two-pronged attack on maximalist liberal activists and those skeptical that any rights talk smacks of globalist anti-Americanism. The question is, can this radically centrist approach sustain itself without an equally sustained commitment to reviving a national liberal consensus at home? Without a remedy to the disease Kristol and Shariati diagnosed, can the center hold?
