n+1 Topic: Zombie Liberalism

A plea for liberal nationalism ignores what it has looked like in practice.

Morsels: 

Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard who has emerged as a kind of expert on the vogueish “crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism” (he has also written for this magazine), has hit upon what he believes is a novel idea for achieving “a kind of society for which there is no clear precedent”—that is, a liberal democracy in a multiethnic country that was for a long time either monoethnic or subject to a racial hierarchy. In his new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, the executive director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s “Renewing the Centre team” argues that a revitalized liberalism is the answer.

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Mounk’s sociological realism should not be confused with critique. His treatise is inspired neither by anti-elite animus nor the radical promise of democracy. It is instead a view from above, or perhaps something like a system-eye view of itself, in which stability is an unquestioned good. Attempting to bring the reader alongside him, Mounk writes often of an unspecified “we” and “us,” evoking a collective liberal mind on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The People vs. Democracy is a map for elites who no longer recognize the world they created, and whose subjects are no longer duped by the myth of popular sovereignty. This is where Mounk enters, stage center-left, posing as a guide out of the present crisis.

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IN THE PEOPLE VS. DEMOCRACY, Mounk distills social science research to (in the language of his website) “create a bold policy agenda capable of solving the biggest challenges of the coming decades.” In addition to “Domesticating Nationalism,” Mounk’s prescriptions include “Fixing the Economy” and “Renewing Civic Faith.” All three remedies for an ailing body politic follow from the same set of basic assumptions: the world is “increasingly complex” and policy-making requires “considerable technical expertise.” But the people are attracted to populist leaders who offer “glib and facile” solutions; after all, “Voters do not like to think that the world is complicated” and often the policies needed for liberalism and democracy to symbiotically flourish again are “far from popular.” The people, in other words, don’t know what’s best for them. Elites more often do, but their messaging and rhetoric fails them. Whence the seeming intractability of the crisis, and the need for a scholarly courtier.

Although Mounk invokes technocracy as a more nuanced approach to complexity, his task is to render the world simple and intelligible to elites who live increasingly rarified lives. From such a distance, what does the world look like? Reminiscent of the populism he dreads, there is a Manichean logic to Mounk’s text. The “defenders of liberal democracy” (that pesky “we”) have a clear enemy: the populists. It doesn’t much matter whether these are right or left in ideology (populism is so promiscuous): what unites them is their distaste for liberal rights, penchant for authoritarianism, and rhetorical tropes of the beleaguered people. Although he acknowledges distinct shades of the populist threat, and even alludes to the fact that reactionary populism has enjoyed a more rapid ascent than its left-wing counterpart, he would rather class Corbyn and Erdogan and Trump and Chávez together (they all “sing from the same songbook”) than go to the trouble enumerating the obvious differences among them.

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It is one of many examples in which Mounk shows himself to be an unreliable guide to post-Trump American political landscape. He accuses “many members of #TheResistance” of being “so hostile to the Democratic party [sic] that they do not see it as a priority to help the opposition win back Congress in 2018 or take the White House in 2020.” This is an attempted shot at the left that misfires twice. The “Resistance” refers to precisely those liberals who, like Mounk, are profoundly wedded to the Democratic Party. Furthermore he fails to understand that the broad support on the left for Bernie Sanders (who is unmentioned in the book) was historically notable precisely because it marked an unusual engagement with the Democratic Party among people who often supported third party candidacies or avoided electoral politics altogether.

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