In 1930, a dozen years after fighting in Italy’s Alpine Campaign and before fighting in the Spanish Civil War, an unremitting enemy of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy until Mussolini had him murdered, Carlo Rosselli published Liberal Socialism. Repeatedly visiting Britain and seeing there a liberal society that had generated a very strong socialist movement, Rosselli became interested in the values and practices that might make a democratic socialism possible. A relentless enemy of Marxist economism and of all forms of authoritarianism, his highest priority was democratic politics; working out the iron laws of history didn’t even make the running. A liberal socialism might or might not happen, but if it did it would arrive via democratic debate and survive if its proponents continued to win elections. Undeceived by a deceptive similarity of sound, Rosselli seems to have had no trouble separating the adjective liberal from the noun liberalism: the ideology of free markets could be distinguished from the democratic practices and political ethics of free citizens. An antifascist in the most literal sense of the word, he would probably not have admired the ethics and tactics of some recent self-described antifascists, neither the ones who wrenched the neck and concussed a Middlebury professor who’d intended to debate Charles Murray in 2017, nor the ones who last year showed up in Bucha.
Along with Rosselli’s Liberal Socialism, Yael Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism was also among Michael Walzer’s inspirations for his thirty-first book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective. Skeptics doubting the possibility a of liberal nationalism and its relationship to a liberal socialism will be indebted to Walzer’s chapter on the former: “Democratic socialists do better when they recognize the national loyalties of their people…Truth to tell, they have not been successful anywhere except in the nation-state…The glory years of social democracy were also years when the European nation-state was strong and when its politics reflected a sense of shared citizenship and mutuality. By contrast, the United States, the great un-nation, is one of the shoddiest welfare states in the Western world.” In his preface he writes, distressingly, that this book may be his last. Written during the pandemic while cut off from both his office and all libraries, it is not a conventional academic book, being deeply personal, openly political in intention as well as subject, quietly and obliquely moving, concise, and fascinating.
Why liberal as an adjective and not as a noun? For Walzer the noun is in our time a useless word. As a doctrine it originally denoted a position very close to what we now call libertarianism, what is still called New Deal liberalism is merely an American version of social democracy, and almost all self-described libertarians, proudly hypervigilant about the potential abuses of state power, seem almost perfectly indifferent to the hyper-visible abuses of private economic power. Neo-liberals were too indifferent to rapidly growing inequality to merit sympathetic attention by people committed to what Walzer thinks a decent politics, and true libertarians too preposterously detached from the world they actually lived in. Walzer, who for some years co-taught a course with Robert Nozick, quotes Nozick claiming that it would take a revolution to create a libertarian capitalist society in America, presumably because for most of our history actually existing American capitalists have made a good stab at capturing rather than minimizing the state. This is persuasive: many modern firms and sectors use state power to restrict competitors’ entry into markets and for that matter workers’ exit from their grasp (via non-competes), bolstering their already superabundant earnings, using the state’s powers to protect themselves against both labor unions and labor markets, also from more efficient and innovative competitors, and our antitrust policy isn’t worthy of the name. So classical liberalism doesn’t exist, even under various noms de guerre.
It might be worth further exploring what people who use the nouns liberal or liberalism in strongly pejorative senses think they mean. My guess is that on the modern American Right liberals are conceived as either statists or perverse and odious cultural adversaries who use state power to override what are asserted to be the majority’s moral intuitions, while on the Left liberals are scorned as those who do not sincerely or sufficiently detest the detestable, even more contemptuously as people determined to retain undeserved privilege, being for decades damned as racists who pretend otherwise. Walzer suggests that many Trump voters are at least as animated by hostility to predatory economic elites as by cultural or racial animosity, thus worth understanding, but this is a very short book, and one cannot fault it for for scanting a noun when it is profoundly committed to reviving an adjective.
Walzer has long described himself as a democratic socialist. My guess is that Rosselli’s employment of ‘liberal’ as an adjective was in significant part a response to Leninism, but I think Walzer’s adjective is a response to the fact that we must now regularly use ‘illiberal’ as an adjective modifying the noun democracy, and for Walzer (and a lot of us) illiberal democracy means durable majoritarian tyranny via erosion of the rule of law, of pluralism and minority rights, of an independent judiciary, a free press and free speech, of countervailing power and of fair elections. We so describe Orban’s Hungary, Modi’s India, Erdogan’s Turkey, and the list goes on. Poland’s democracy is frequently described as illiberal, as is Israel’s current government, at the national level American democracy looked increasingly illiberal between 2016 and 2020, many of our states remains so, and after 2024 we may become so at the national level. Walzer points out that during Trump’s 2016-2020 term the judiciary and a number of national and local officials acted with what Habermas termed constitutional patriotism, thwarting various illiberal and illegal maneuvers culminating in the events of January 6, but it is unclear whether people now in those offices will do the same again. So we dodged a bullet but may not dodge the next one, and not everyone has been so lucky. Putin’s Russia, technically a democracy, is at best an illiberal one, as is Maduro’s Venezuela, as is the current Nicaraguan regime, and this list is easily lengthened—very considerably lengthened.
So the preservation and restoration of liberal democracy seem Walzer’s sharpest concerns. Illiberal socialism is a creed in retreat; Xi’s alarming trajectory notwithstanding, China’s allure depends on its ability to produce very high economic growth without democracy, and Xi’s policies seem unlikely to restore great luster to the Chinese economy. But liberal democracy is threatened by a considerable number of developments, some of them less obvious than others. One of the less obvious ones results from attempts to delegitimize an imperfectly liberal democracy by stressing only its imperfections, so that a given example is imagined to be so grievously flawed that it is barely (if at all) worth our support.
When this proceeds from certain quarters I’d call it a new form of the trahison des clercs, but Walzer is characteristically more tactful and more patient, explaining that the flaws are scarcely unique to one’s own democracy: “From its beginning, slavery, racism, misogyny, xenophobia and class war (he means waged from above) have shadowed democracy.” Recklessly paraphrasing him, also adding positions Walzer may not share: democracies are shaped by their exclusions but possess the power to expand the rolls of those who are counted as the demos. These expansions are neither inevitable nor irreversible, although the trend over the last couple of centuries in some parts of the world has been generally encouraging. Political health requires an honest history of any given democracy, which means acknowledging all of these things. We need what was once called education in civics, we need it on a pretty grand scale, and we’ve let this slip. Delegitimization has proceeded from a number of different political quadrants, and the cumulative effect is obviously dangerous (e.g. 2020, both the attempted coup and the changing composition and participation of party electorates). Civic education requires more than an honest national history, it requires, among other things, some terse but sophisticated comparative history and some political theory.
The Struggle for a Decent Politics is not least a work of political education, and I assume it’s intended for groups of citizens who once seemed to know better (Yale University Press is not a mass-marketer). With luck, those who learn from it will teach others. Some of its readers will decide that there is little new here—they’ll be wrong—and will have previously assumed that what desperately matters and has been forgotten (or never learned) is too complicated to be explained quickly and more or less from scratch. My guess is that this slim book will demonstrate that this was a destructive and unearned pessimism, and I was reminded of Richard Feynman observation that “If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood”, but this is probably because I lack some of Walzer’s generosity and tenacious optimism, or at least the appearance of optimism; I was also reminded of Hume’s injunction that cheerfulness is a kind of duty. I’m pretty sure that it really is a duty if you believe that a durable liberal democracy is possible.
For Walzer the essence of liberal democracy is the knowledge that political victory cannot be final. For this and other reasons willingness to lose power in an election is crucial, something he thinks best achieved by making sure that the loss of power does not mean retaliation by a successor. Rigging the rules to minimize or exclude the possibility of losing the next election is a hallmark of illiberal democracy. This is very obviously true of Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary, Modi’s India, etc., and for Americans at least a case of de te fabula narratur. When writing this book Walzer was at best uneasy about the prudence of indicting and incarcerating Donald Trump—he thinks maximizing the chances of peaceful transitions matters more than almost anything.
There is of course a chance that the deterrent value of prosecuting seditious conspiracy furthers Walzer’s declared end more than would ignoring Trump’s encouragement of a violent mob seeking to abort the results of presidential election, but one of the striking things about this book is that it encourage readers to silently argue this and any other point with its author with the result that one is moved to emulate his liberal disposition while on the verge of an irritated certainty. Liberal temperaments are for Walzer’s purpose defined in moral and psychological as well as political or cultural terms, so that in every sphere the type he describes is or aspires to be openminded, generous, tolerant, lives with ambiguity, is ready for arguments but does not feel compelled to win them, is never dogmatic or fanatic, and crucially, never a relativist: cruelty and bigotry are everywhere odious, and Walzer insists that a likely taste for gentle irony in no way precludes anger and fierce realism. He notes that these qualities can be seen in people who do not describe themselves as liberal, which may clarify one of the things I think Walzer is getting at: certain political commitments and dispositions are necessary for a liberal politics to survive, and our existing mental and rhetorical habits do not unfailingly identify who has them. Walzer’s taxonomy distinguishes liberal and illiberal socialists, democrats, communitarians, nationalists, internationalists, feminists, intellectuals, professors and Jews, and in every case a version of a liberal temperament is the sine qua non.
Walzer’s analyses makes these dispositions infectious. Two examples, occasions I felt moved to argue with Walzer’s arguments: the first was when he assessed the ACLU’s 1977 intervention on behalf of Nazis intending to march through Skokie, a town with a significant population of Holocaust survivors. Walzer, a former freedom rider, wonders whether we are obliged to defend the right to march against racism in the same way we are obliged to defend those seeking to march for it, suggesting that the Nazis wanted to march for a very specific, unusual and ugly reason: to make Holocaust survivors again fear for their lives. He scrupulously refuses to consider the Skokie survivors as people whose feelings might be hurt and instead tries to distinguish the case, suggesting that an absolutely unwavering defense of free speech excludes the possibility that “we” might ever be wrong about a core commitment, in this case an exultant certainty dating to Mill’s publication of On Liberty. This triggered an irritable reflex, in part because in 19977 I’d joined the ACLU in admiration of its position on Skokie, and my membership having lapsed ceased to feel any desire to rejoin when my sister informed me that the NYS ACLU no longer took a similar position on freedom of speech. The classic objection against what Walzer calls a handful of possible exceptions is the very strong argument about a slippery slope, specifically the extreme difficulty of persuasively establishing the rules for exceptions, and I rehearsed this until I began to wonder whether my angry certainty was illiberal, and whether I was gripped with the dangerous belief that one had to win even a silent argument. There were, after all, possible compromises: Nazis might retain the right to march in Chicago, but not in the immediate presence of survivors. What Walzer’s book had given me was not Talleyrand’s injunction of Pas de zèle!, rather a reminder about the often reckless and sometimes toxic pleasures of indignation. I do not think that any of Walzer’s reservations make for irresolution and flaccidity; nothing about his long career as a political intellectual and polemicist makes that even remotely plausible.
The final impulse to argue: Walzer is skeptical that there can be liberal imperialists, writing this twice, both times tentatively, and again the argument he invited wound up suggesting one of the liberal virtues he seeks to encourage. The latest Ugandan news broke while I began thinking about this book: Musaveni had signed into law a bill that included the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” which included “seducing someone through “misrepresentation” or “undue influence”, both undefined. The Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 also “imposes life imprisonment for anyone found to have performed a sexual act with a person of the same gender, and up to seven years in prison for “an attempt to commit the offense of homosexuality”. Uganda is now one of thirty African states criminalizing homosexuality, as do thirty-eight others elsewhere, and one of eleven countries prescribing the death penalty for some consensual homosexual acts. On television and in print Musaveni and several Ugandan MPs contemptuously described foreign opposition as imperialism. No one has yet been killed by the Ugandan state for violating this law—it is only days old—but a courageous Ugandan activist, interviewed on PBS, was asked about a friend and comrade who’d just the other day been savagely beaten by a vigilante mob. It was not yet clear whether he’d survive, and his case was not the only example of very recent mob violence. A commentator noted that Uganda’s law would almost certainly encourage similar legislation in other African states. The imperialism the Ugandan politicians meant—condemnation by members of another culture, maybe economic sanctions—is obviously not what Walzer meant as implausible and mischaracterized “liberal imperialism”. Nor, I think, did he mean the use of military force in what was recently termed humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo.
I began doing some mental arithmetic: if Uganda did what it had just made legally possible, making a very conservative estimate of how many Ugandans would be at some risk meant about 1.6 million people, which is a bit under five times the number of Jews living in Germany in 1939. The only sanction now publicly meditated by Biden’s administration would end some money that pays for Uganda’s anti-HIV campaign, which would have very little chance of deterring Uganda’s legislature and President. As a thought experiment: what if the harms Uganda has just promised to inflict can only be averted by imperial conquest and rule? If you want to avoid thinking about the theoretical possibility of a liberal imperialism one move is to diminish any notion that this kind of atrocity is peculiarly non-Western by pointing out that the criminalization of homosexuality was initially a law imposed by the British colonial authorities, that American evangelicals have enthusiastically aided and cheered on sub-Saharan African homophobic legislation, and that the version of Christianity invoked by some African legislators is a European import—by implication an effect of imperialism, not a justification for it. But I did not think Walzer would make any such argument, nor point to the relatively recent imposition of the death penalty for some homosexual acts in societies very much like our own, e.g. the last two men executed for sodomy in Great Britain were hanged in 1835, the last Dutchman executed in 1801, the last two Frenchmen in 1750, the last Prussian lesbian in 1721, the last Venetian (burned alive) in 1773, so tu quoque and then some. But Walzer is not given to tu quoque, nor do I think he would likely adduce the case of Belgians murdering and torturing Congolese Africans on a horrifying scale while justifying that imperial venture in liberal imperialist terms—antislavery–and by his own standards Walzer is denied any relativist argument. So why did he disdain the possibility of a liberal imperialism?
Thinking it through, I decided that Walzer’s demand for fierce realism was in play, also his profound anti-authoritarianism. It is fierce realism that makes one recall the consequences of most episodes of self-described liberal imperialism. But it is not only that liberal imperialism will inevitably look like hypocrisy, nor that in our era any possible benefits will likely be vastly outweighed by other pretty odious consequences, it is also that presuming to undertake a civilizing mission is for a number of reasons radically illiberal. But if that is what Walzer thinks, he might not think it if the still-hypothetical death toll in Uganda reached a dreadful level, and after all, a prohibition of fanaticism means no anti-intervention fanaticism, for there should be no absolute certainty on most questions. I thought again of Richard Feynman, who once remarked that “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” I think Walzer would have considered Feynman a liberal physicist. I’m pretty confident that he’s made me a less illiberal reader.