Does Liberalism Have a Usable Past?

Does Liberalism Have a Usable Past?

Something of a “part two” to the earlier piece on the Short History of American Liberalism. Eric over at the Edge of the American West has written a really brilliant post that outlines not only liberalism’s best accomplishments, but also its failures, and suggests what may be “usable” from its legacy (as the title suggests).

In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks challenged his readers to see American history as non-Americans see it. “Go to England and you will discover that in English eyes ‘American [history]’ has become, while quite as complete an entity as it is with us, an altogether different one.” I can say from personal experience it is true today. In England the history of the United States is the Revolution, the Crisis of Slavery, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement—the fulfillment, over time, of the liberal promises written in 1776, made good at last even to a people once considered chattels. And a nation of pasty young white people like it. Because it is a story of collective action in the name of justice, of triumph over obstacles, of right making might. A history of liberalism.

And it is a history that inspires young white people in America today, people young and unprepared to hedge and qualify. This generation unmarred as yet by such disappointments as accrued to the youth of the 1960s, is a generation prepared to believe and make use of that story, a generation who think it offers them hope.

It seems to me that liberalism’s biggest problem is that it concentrates too much on formal equality, on relying upon institutions to secure the “empty space” in which people have the ability to work out their conflicts in a non-violent way, rather than actual equality. There seems to be two underlying problems to this approach: (1) as Zizek argues, this empty space is never truly “empty,” it is always stained by some form of enjoyment, such as nationalism or consumerism; (2) and as Schmitt argues, these institutions are moreover depoliticizing in that they attempt to conceal the fundamental political antagonism within society.

I wonder, then, if there is some way to salvage liberalisms’ attitude of “collective action in the name of justice” and its sympathetic focus on those who are “Excluded” towards an “ethics of the Real” that does not attempt to gloss over either the ‘stain of enjoyment’ or political antagonism. Perhaps some kind of politics of aletheia, of unconcealment, in which pre-symbolic structures of society undergo a process of disclosure.