Your freedom depends on mine and mine on yours
Greg Sargent’s first tweet this morning points to a Medium post by Russ Greene. A quick scan of Greene’s feed (and his location in Washington, D.C.) suggests that in addition to being a self-decribed “elite cosmopolitan liberal,” he is immersed in the world of ideas (and young) and new to tweeting.
Greene’s Medium essay examines Stephen Holmes’ defense of liberalism from 1993.
It has been a long time since studying philosophy at the academy, so I have to blow the mental dust off some of his references. Nonetheless, one paragraph from the essay and a tweet of his from Friday perhaps capture my general mood.
Reacting to a critique of liberalism, Holmes observed, “the disallowance of self-exemption constitutes the moral core of liberal constitutionalism.” Thus, “all liberals explicitly subordinate self-interest to a binding and enforceable norm of fairness.” Playing off that observation, I might add that the notion of a social contract is the matrix in which a “liberal regime permits diverse groups of people to live and work together by limiting the scope of government and guaranteeing individual rights.” This the New Right rejects. Self-exemption for themselves is a given. They do not want to govern. They want to rule.
Of the ascendant New Right, Greene writes:
The antiliberals are right to claim that liberalism falls short as a source of meaning, and an ethical system. Antiliberals are wrong, though, to insist that this fact discredits liberal government, or somehow justifies an illiberal rejection of constitutionally limited, liberal democracy. After all, liberalism is rooted in, and fosters, enduring institutions of morality and meaning that help lift our eyes above our own greed and pride.
Your freedom depends on mine and mine on yours. Approaching each other on a narrow sidewalk, one of us has to give way. Me this time and maybe you the next.
Our pursuit of happiness (and meaning) involves mutual accommodation and a degree of order, but not order über alles. Systems of thought that propose to answer all questions and provide all meaning lead to … well, to where the New Right is headed.
Greene tweeted Friday:
Let’s not discount the harm money managers can do. But after Digby’s Thursday post about Vanity Fair‘s mention of Curtis Yarvin, I spent some time with YouTube podcasts of interviews in which Yarvin holds forth for what seem to be mostly younger male audiences. He is one of those aspiring world changers infatuated with the sound of his own ideas.
Damon Linker devoted some space at The Week last year to the “self-described monarchist” being feted at the conservative Claremont Institute. Yarvin argued that the United States needs an “American Caesar,” someone to destroy the federal government once and for all so the world (or at least the U.S.) can be “remade.”
Linker observed that “on the starboard side of American politics, the Overton window has now shifted far beyond the boundaries of democratic self-government to a place broadly coterminous with fascism.”
Greene’s conclusion is that the left had best get busy pushing back in defense of Jefferson’s “self evident” truths, what Frederick Douglass acknowledged as America’s “saving principles.” The New Right is prepared to toss them onto the ash-heap of history.
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