How Joe Biden can Greatly Expand the Conversation Around Liberalism
Welcome back to Trad Lib News. Since our inaugural episode, much has happened in the political world. Justin Amash has dropped out of the US presidential race, leaving Joe Biden as very likely the only candidate who is somewhere on the liberal spectrum. While I’ll still be interested in hearing from the libertarian candidate, as always, this election is now likely to be framed as a contest between Biden’s old school liberalism vs President Trump’s populism.
Today, I want to expand on my point in the previous episode, about how liberalism should go back to its roots as going hand in glove with traditional institutions. A Biden campaign would be a good chance to have this conversation, because it is expected that Biden will be making a case for safeguarding the traditional institutions of American democracy during his campaign, and also because of Biden’s lifelong support for everyday working families.
To illustrate the importance of this point, I will read an excerpt from the draft of my upcoming book, the 4th book from the Moral Libertarian Horizon series, title still to be determined:
“To understand our current plight, I guess we should take a look at how we got here. As Europe was emerging out of a feudalistic order and into the earliest stages of industrialized economy back in the 18th and 19th century, the political divisions that we often take for granted today began to emerge. The first stage saw the division of politics into a ‘Left’ and a ‘Right’ during the French Revolution, with the Left including those who wanted a more egalitarian order, and the Right including those who want to maintain as much of the old order as possible, and as such, were generally against egalitarianism. This was the birth of the paradigm that pit equality and tradition against each other, as a binary opposition. By circumstance of history, the ‘historical Left’, the faction that believed in equality and ultimately gave rise to liberals and socialists alike, was alienated from an appreciation of tradition at birth.
The fact is, as morally sound as liberal values and principles are, liberals have all too often been agnostic to the wider questions of culture, meaning, and heritage. Back in the 19th century, this was perhaps fine, as the traditional cultural context in which liberalism was born was still largely intact. But two centuries later, we live in a world few people probably envisioned back then: a world where nothing seems to have any permanent meaning, and nothing seems to be inherently worth cherishing, because it would be replaced by something else soon enough. It’s a world where people throw away their posessions before they are broken, simply so that they can get the latest model instead. It’s a world where even marriage, the most bedrock of institutions since time immemorial, has ceased to be permanent for at least two generations, with about 40% of marriages ending in divorce. That’s 4 in 10! We’ve gotten so used to ‘facts of life’ like these that many don’t even notice how dystopian they really are.
Critics on both the contemporary left and the contemporary right charge liberalism with being about technocratic managament of the economy and society, and they paint liberalism as all about transactional politics. But this is not inherently true of liberalism. Back when traditional culture was still intact, liberal values like free speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion alike were valuable because they were the means for peacefully debating over things which people cherished. In other words, free speech was valuable because the speech was used to debate things which people cherished, and would fight nail and tooth for. Similarly, our democratic processes, the very processes which both the hard left and the hard right deride as technocratic today, were valuable because they ensured a fair outcome in the determination of laws and policies that people cherished. Using a more Moral Libertarian perspective, people valued having their Equal share of Moral Agency because they wanted to use that Agency to protect or promote that which they cherished. As you see, the key word here is ‘cherish’. In a world where there is nothing much left to cherish anymore, politics is reduced to either a game of power struggle (which is the way both the hard left and the hard right see it) or a reality TV style popularity contest (which is perhaps why the current US President is a reality TV star). There simply is no place for classical liberal values in either of these types of ‘politics’.
Therefore, in their neglect about preserving a cultural environment where people have things to cherish, liberals have contributed to their own decline over the decades and centuries.”
I wish that Joe Biden will focus on the matter of values in his campaign, and if he does that, it could be a real turning point in the liberal conversation, that may end up saving the fate of liberalism in the longer run. Of course, it will also be a good campaign strategy for him, because it will focus the campaign on something which has always been his strength as well as Trump’s weakness, and will also bring him the diverse support he needs.
Originally published at http://taraellasunnya.blogspot.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter, independent journalist and author, who is passionate about free speech, liberty and equality. She is the author of the Moral Libertarian Horizon books, which focus on developing a moral case for freedom-based politics in the 21st century.
