Review: ‘Cross Purposes’ by Jonathan Rauch

It’s a helpful review but the author seems to conflate two different ideologies as if they were the same thing: specifically classical liberalism and modern liberalism.

They are related, for sure. In the quoted piece, he seems to see that we’re talking about two different things, but in much of the review he lumps them together.

Both phases of liberalism have some values. It’s not really possible, ultimately, to argue that citizens ought to be free to have a voice in their government without an appeal to moral values.

But classical liberalism didn’t agree on the basis for those values—and the values set was pretty minimal, on purpose, on the premise that societies should mostly self-govern by the values they figure out together. (Modern liberalism brought in a lot more values and ideals, not all of which are bad in themselves, by the way—but it’s an expanded values set. And the problem of what to base values on remains.)

I don’t doubt that there are problems with Raush’s solution, but I’m realy glad he’s pushing back on the ‘liberalism is dead’ idea.

America was founded on classical liberalism and we are now witnessing daily its replacement with increasing authoritarianism and plutocracy. Which brings me to my main point:

We do not have a good replacement for classical liberalism.

It has weaknesses to be sure, but any human government will, and America’s founders understood that—and took the view that republican democracy, with rule of law at the center, was the best set of tradeoffs.

We could argue all day that it’s not working well, and be mostly right, but nobody has come up with a better alternative.

And this is where conservatism comes in (the real thing, not today’s self-parody): conservatism says you don’t toss out what you have until you understand how it came to be and have a good reason to think you have something better to replace it.

The post-liberalisms I’ve read (admittedly not deeply—but by their advocates) don’t seem to be conservative on either of these points. The suggested alternatives, so far, are various species of church-state fusions, but they really look to me like slight variations on models that were already tried and failed centuries ago.