Defending, restoring, transforming.
| Author | Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence |
| Position | EDITORIAL |
Fascism is like a virus. As Hannah Malone writes in this issue, like a virus, it 'comes in waves'; between 'outbreaks', it doesn't disappear, but survives 'in the nooks and crannies of society'. It relies on a 'host organism', such as the democratic state, and benefits from 'crises of the liberal state and weaknesses of its "immune system"'. It comes in different strands, often with distinct national inflections, and finally, like a virus, it 'mutates constantly'. This mutability makes precise definitions of fascism tricky; for some far-right movements today, categories like ultra-nationalism, illiberalism, authoritarianism, populism, or alt-Right are more appropriate. Nevertheless, a constellation of malign tendencies--to pit 'the people' against external and internal 'enemies', often racialised; to oppose liberal democracy; to celebrate a strong-arm leader; to ennoble violence--unite these movements. Opposing them is one of the left's most important tasks today.
Because fascists undermine and criticise liberal democracy, our opposition must involve defending its traditions. This is one reason we focus on liberalism in this issue of Renewal. Liberalism is, for some parts of the left, suspect. This is particularly the case for those associated with Blue Labour, who see liberalism as denoting atomised individualism; universalising, and deaf to the music of local tradition that knits particular communities together. Katrina Forrester (interviewed in this issue), in her book In the Shadow of Justice, draws out what is likely to be a surprising finding for those critics: John Rawls, father of liberal egalitarianism, was profoundly interested in communitarian thinking and placed it at the heart of his philosophical system. Rawls was a liberal in that he thought the 'basic structure' of society should enable individuals to pursue their own plans for a fulfilling life. But he was, on a deeper level, a communitarian who thought individuals necessarily developed their sense of what those plans might be in the context of their families, their associations (of faith, of work, and so on) and their communities. Labour must strike a balance between valuing our existing associations and communities, and empowering individuals to work to change them--or to leave them if they want to. And, fundamentally, Labour needs to assert that it is a society where power and wealth are shared more equally which protects communities while also empowering individuals.
In recent years, a debate has taken place between those--like Jan Werner-Muller and Timothy Snyder--who think we should recover cold war liberalism as a defence against fascism and totalitarianism, and scholars like Samuel Moyn and Helena Rosenblatt, who find cold war liberalism too narrow and individualistic, constricted and unambitious. Moyn and Rosenblatt argue that we need, instead, to recover the longer and more varied history of liberalism. Writing in this issue, Iain Stewart follows this line of argument in suggesting that we need to move beyond cold war liberalism and revisit more capacious and emancipatory versions of liberalism. Too often liberalism has become associated with defending society as it is, not as it could be. But is liberalism--even a strong liberal egalitarianism which guarantees economic rights as well as civil ones--enough? Forrester is sceptical. There is much to rescue from liberal egalitarianism, she argues, but, fundamentally, her work historicises and thus renders unfamiliar Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism. By revealing how profoundly Rawlsianism was shaped by the US and the UK of the 1950s, she shows how much we need to rethink for today. No longer can we assume that there is a core of consensus at the heart of society that can contain or override conflict; no longer should we take the straight, white man as the imagined subject of liberal democracy.
Stewart also points out, though, that not every cold war liberal was the defensive proto-neoliberal that critics sometimes imply: there are lessons to draw, even here. As Stewart writes, the focus of cold war liberals 'on democracy's social and economic conditions of possibility' was important. The economic model which they thought guaranteed those conditions would today be 'ecologically indefensible and regressive from the standpoint of gender equality'; but the effort to think...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
