At the outset of this essay, I shall lay out its rationale: it is neither a puff piece nor a denigratory one. Re the former, by laying out my argument I would like to make it clear that I am neither glorifying nor eulogizing the 47the president of the United States, Donald Trump. Neither am I in the ‘denigrating game’ of Trump’s adversaries.
What I am interested in is teasing out the ‘facts’ of public discourse and politics in the United States. (My perspective is that of the ‘outside looking in’). The broader and the larger reference is to democracy and liberal democratic legitimation – oftentimes used as a cudgel against Donald Trump - by his adversaries.
Obviously, this is a very broad frame of reference; it would take reams to assess and evaluate. To make the hypothesis manageable, I shall reduce this frame of reference to ‘liberal tolerance or toleration’ and reason (public) as the cardinal tenets of western liberal democracy.
(I may also state that the catalytic spur for this essay is that after my writing essays on the United States, its contemporary focus with Donald Trump at its center, and sending these to a bevy of people, I have been blocked by two eminent scholars - presumably liberals. In a lighter vein, as my bad luck would have it - both are female!)
‘Political Liberalism’ in USA
Now returning to the core of the essay I will employ – very briefly and reductively - some of the essential ideas of two eminence grises – John Rawls and Michael Walzer - (both liberal political thinkers) as the thematic pegs of this essay. Briefly, the great John Rawls, in one of his ouvres, ‘Political Liberalism’, postulated that, ‘the essence of political liberalism and its legitimation lay in the liberal state’s commitment to the ideal of public reason’.
This assertion elevated reason as the ultimate in public debate and reasoning. Another eminence grise, Michael Walzer, while drawing a distinction between ‘tolerance’ - more as theoretical construct and edifice – and ‘toleration’ – as actual practice roughly meaning peaceful co-existence - privileged the immigration regime, civic nationalism and multi-culturalism. Reductively, in the schemata of both Rawls and Walzer, tolerance or/and toleration are central - by implication in Rawl’s primary assertion and explicitly by Walzer.
Both, it would appear have been problematic in the public life of the United States. In a tangential way - either by omission or commission – they may have been among the reasons that begat ‘Trumpism’.
Consider the eminent John Rawls first. By grafting and tacking Rawlsian liberalism on the United States, what emerges as an egregious ‘fact’ about the country’s public life and debate thereof is the absence of reason and ‘reasoned debate’ by people who may be same but ‘who hold different conceptions of the good’.
‘Chest Thumping Champions’ of Liberalism
The Democrats – purveyors and ‘chest thumping champions’ of liberalism, for example, instituted public policies over the heads of the American people (probably holding themselves to be modern day philosopher kings?).
The fourth estate in the country was reduced to ‘whitewashing’ these policies by ‘manufacturing consent’. But when there was reaction against these policies - globalism, multi-culturalism and so on-the same people took recourse to hysterical lampooning, discrediting and vulgarly polemicizing their opponents.
The latest in this saga of lampooning is a 'brown man’ of the Fareed Zakaria name and fame - a man who’s done well for himself in immersing himself liberally in American public life and promoting political liberalism in a garishly odd way.
In a recent public address, Zakaria told Americans how Zelensky could have ingratiated himself with Donald Trump and gotten a ‘deal’ from him. This was Zakaria at his best – lampooning and discrediting.
The point here is that ‘public debate’ in the United States had devolved into slanging matches, discrediting campaigns, ‘manufacturing consent’ and so on - all at odds with pristine liberalism modified and finessed by John Rawls.
Now with respect to Michael Walzer, while Toleration is an excellent principle -in both theory and praxis- and civic nationalism may, for a modern nation, be the ‘salubrious solvent’ for diluting ‘difference’ and ‘crafting a peaceful public sphere’, it raises the obvious issue of the extent of toleration.
Would toleration mean 'respecting divergent points of view and different perspectives (which is fine and even noble but which is more an ideal type or a noble aspiration - as my experience with the ‘enlightened' female western academics who blocked after the initial 'you are so kind' remarks when I complimented them for their works suggests)?
Or would toleration seep into public policy thereby creating conditions that jar with many- thus creating a basis for an exclusionary nationalism and populism?
Exploration of Thematic Issues
The nature of this essay precludes a fuller exploration of the thematic issues delineated here by way of concrete examples of the same. But to belabor the point and aver the core of the essay: Liberals of America and liberalism in the United States by not being true to themselves and their creed floundered and tripped on their own proverbial feet. Two, they went too far with their academic and philosophic glosses. This went against the ‘vox’ who voted with their feet begetting Trumpism in the process.
By laying out my set of assertions, I do not mean to demean political liberalism and privilege Trumpism. All I am doing is putting the contradictions, paradoxes and even hypocrisies of liberals into perspective.
The ‘liberal fetish and fanaticism’ - best reflected in the End of History thesis (which some held to be the philosophical justification of the Second Gulf War as in Fukuyama with a gun), the contradictions begotten did more harm to liberalism than anything else.
In an ‘Age of Extremes’, populism may even have been the natural reaction to this. But populism in its raw and extreme form is also not the answer to the United States’ deep problems.
What is then? The answer may lie in John Rawl’s ‘reasoned public debate’. Let this debate happen, let liberalism be one of the contenders (not a hegemonic one) and let populism also compete. Whosoever wins, let America be his or hers!
Have you liked the news article?