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. [...] 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 lik...