Links 18.2024
On a Personal Note
As I’m currently (and literally) on the road, I couldn’t adhere to the usual newsletter format today. Yet, I don’t wanna let you hang out to dry. That’s why I’m using this off-week to do some proper shameless self-promotion. But the good sort, you know. Because I’m giving you an exclusive sneak peek into a yet-unpublished interview with me. If that doesn’t make up for the lack of links this week, I won’t know. Enjoy!
BTW, I have been rather prolific on the content front. Stay tuned for my new podcast and some high-quality video content. I will update you once they are released. Seems like you will be hearing much more from me! Not sure that’s a good thing. But it’s happening. That’s also where I will be dealing with this Tucker x Dugin episode that dropped out of nowhere.
Yet, I didn’t want to spoil Orthodox Easter by talking about these devilish figures.
Христос воскресе!
Interview w/ Sven Gerst: Sources of Liberal Complacency & the Way Out of the Many Crises of Liberalism
The excellent Alexandru hosted me for an interview with Comunitatea Liberală 1848. And since we are basically touching on all core themes of this newsletter during our conversation, I thought this could be interesting to many of you. Plus, I threw in some new bangers and extra spicy takes, such as this one:
In my view, Marxism was never really an intellectual competitor to liberalism. It ran out of steam too quickly (i.e. the Austrians basically buried its economic theory) and was essentially kept on life-support by the hermeneutics and inaccessibility of French intellectualism that journalists so dearly love. Yet, it was conceptually too weak to rival liberalism.
That’s probably not true for the anti-liberalism that we see blossoming today.
Check it out!
Note that this piece hasn’t been published yet; but Alexandru kindly allowed me to share the unedited (!) version with you here. Self-recommending, as they say:
Liberal Community: Let us start our conversation on liberalism and its fate after the 1989 moment with a much-abused concept - „the end of history”. Francis Fukuyama used it in an essay published in August 1989 (in the American Interest) and then in his book of the same title (1993). In a way, Fukuyama was prophetic - shortly after, we had the 1989 revolutions in Central-Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Can we speculate that this notion was wrongly understood and eventually lead to a sense of complacency, given that a simplified view of „the end of history” thesis assumes that history has a clear direction, progress is inevitable, and ideological competitors of liberal democracy are discredited?
Sven Gerst: There is a reason why Fukuyama’s “The End of History” has become so infamous—and almost feels like a meme now. Not because Fukuyama was particularly right or wrong. We all know that “it is difficult to predict, especially the future”—to quote Niels Bohr here. And that is why we usually hold back our mockery when predictions don’t turn out true. However, the criticism and ridicule that Fukuyama receives seem disproportionate. And the reasons for this might be (1) that his essay so aptly encapsulates the mood of liberals at that time; and (2) its impact on the liberal confidence. Now, I’m too young to speak from first person experience here; but if I look at the intellectual development of liberalism in the 90s and early 2000s, I must say that is has turned into an uninspiring, self-referential, and almost pompous kind of movement. And it is hard to deny the “Fukuyama Factor” (to play with his own terminology) in this liberal triumphalism. Plus, he is kind of a meme-able guy.
Liberal Community: On the other hand, we are now witnessing a crisis of liberalism and liberal democracy, a backsliding of all the values Europe and the US share. How should we revisit the idea of „the end of history”?
Sven Gerst: Nah, I wouldn’t agree with the thesis that we see a backsliding of liberal values. Maybe of liberal democratic institutions; but not of values. But before I go on this tangent, let me quickly answer your question about idea of “The End of History.” There could be the Steven Pinker-kind of view that long arch of history is bending towards justice—and that what we currently see is just “a bump in the road” but the long-term trend is still intact. I’m not sure this is true. I rather think that a cyclical model of history is the better mental model for thinking about the future than the native idea of eternal progress—which to a certain degree lulled liberals into their current complacency.
That’s maybe a good way to think about it: Even if “The End of History” was metaphysically true, it’d be better to adopt a more pessimistic view for instrumental reasons. This sort of internal pragmatism would serve the importance and urgency of the liberal cause much better.
Liberal Community: What is the danger for the EU values given the prediction that extreme-right might take the third place in the European Elections? How liberal and pro-European parties should react to the assault of values on which the Union was built?
Sven Gerst: When it comes to the European Union, I think we have seen a paradigm shift after Brexit and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And this is not fully understood yet. While the traditional populist critique (i.e. detached, unelected bureaucrats, etc.) is still used; it is merely used for electoral purposes. But the Right in Europe doesn’t want to destroy the European Union anymore; they want to hijack it. In other words, they waived goodbye to the Nexit, Dexit, or Swexit discourse of the past.
Now, they want to capture the EU the same way that they captured liberal democracies in Hungary or Poland. And they have good chances to succeed. Because the salient issues of the day are on their side: migration and European identity. In my view, it will be very hard for liberals to compete on those two fronts. For example, how would liberals package the need for more and more migration (most likely from Northern Africa and hence the Muslim world) so that Europe will avoid its fade of becoming a museum of economic stagnation against a populist narrative based on a model of European-ness based on Christianity and whatnot? I have a hard time seeing that. So, that’s the diagnosis. On the prescriptive side, I think liberals should (at the margin) devote most resources to institutional reform in the EU. Make sure the populists can’t damage too much of the European project. Because on the electoral side, I think the European Union is just at the beginning of its own populist moment.
Liberal Community: What is your take on the debate about the so-called „crisis of liberalism”? Do you agree with Jan Werner Muller that these authors are just „merchants of moral panic”?
Sven Gerst: I mean, I’ve been writing and talking about the “Crisis of Liberalism” for many years myself, so it will be very hard for me to take the other side. But I have never considered myself a “merchant of panic.” Instead, I have kind of embraced and almost welcome the intellectual and political challenges that liberals face today. In the long run, I believe it will make us more anti-fragile. In Chapter 2 of JS Mill’s “On Liberty” (maybe the best chapter in the liberal canon) he talks about the importance of freedom of speech so that no opinion can ever become a dead dogma and will remain a living truth. In my view, Marxism was never really an intellectual competitor to liberalism. It ran out of steam too quickly (i.e. the Austrians basically buried its economic theory) and was essentially kept on life-support by the hermeneutics and inaccessibility of French intellectualism that journalists so dearly love. Yet, it was conceptually too weak to rival liberalism.
That’s probably not true for the anti-liberalism that we see blossoming today.
Liberal Community: Fukuyama believes that Ukraine's victory will „make possible a new birth of freedom” and a reignition of the 1989 spirit. His recent book revisits liberalism and offers a new philosophical approach to liberal principles and values. What other books which aim to reinvent liberalism would you recommend to a passionate reader who wants to discover and explore the many facets of modern liberalism?
Sven Gerst: Liberals don’t need to read more liberal books. The idea of human liberty has been around since ancient times and transformed into a political movement during the Enlightenment period. It is probably the richest and most influential intellectual tradition there is. We already have JS Mill, FA Hayek, and Hannah Arendt. Read them! There is no shortage of great liberal works. But in my view, it is much more important for aspiring liberal intellectuals to read the critics of liberalism—and study their arguments. Over the last couple of years, I have compiled a reading list called “The Illiberal Canon” which combines the classics of anti-liberalism (e.g. Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger) with contemporary critics (e.g. Patrick Deneen or John Gray) as well the most dangerous minds (e.g. Alexander Dugin or Martin Sellner). That’s what I would (and do) read!
Liberal Community: In Europe there is a growing concern and anxiety concerning the rise of populism and right-wing extremism, What should liberal parties do to counteract illiberal actors?
Sven Gerst: This is the million-dollar question, right? So, naturally, I will disappoint with anything that I will say…and to be honest, I would also not trust anyone who claims to have ready-made solutions for this. Because to have easy answers would (1) deny the significance of the “populist challenge” and (2) discount the complexities and nuances that shape the specifics of each political discourse. For example, conclusions from Germany would not necessarily work in Romania and vice versa.
But I also understand that you want to hear something from me. So, here is some food for thought and some of the ideas that I have pitched to liberal democratic ideas before.
First (and here I am contradicting myself to a certain degree), we need to study the successful case studies of where we were liberal democrats were able to beat the populists and/or (and this is important!) where they were able to contain the populists. What do I mean by that? Of course, we need to study how the Polish opposition could finally win against PiS after struggling for more than a decade. Yet, we should also study how the Danish parties were able to sideline the Danish People’s Party.
Now the temptation is to take these lessons and mindlessly trying to replicate them. That’s what has been done before…and what probably sounded smart at that time. But that is not what I am saying. Instead, these observations need to go into a “Populist Playbook” that we should build. As you know, I truly believe that the populist attack on liberalism follows very similar patterns. Getting ahead of the moves of your opponent, will secure victory. If liberals understood 15 years ago that we are undergoing a political realignment, they would have not alienated their potential allies. Or: If liberals understood that populism adopts a Schmittian understanding of “the political”, populists wouldn’t have had the lead on surfacing social cleavages. Or: if liberals understood that populists will reframe the term ‘democracy’ for their purposes, liberals would have adopted the terminology of ‘liberal democracy’ much earlier. “The Populist Playbook” should be the common project for all liberal parties worldwide.
And that is just politics. We need the same on the intellectual level where we need thinkers that dare to make liberalism an intellectual adventure again. We haven’t cultivated any thought leaders, such as Milton Friedman, Hannah Arendt or FA Hayek, for way too long. What most political parties don’t want to understand is that they need those second-hand dealers in ideas. The Social Democrats invited Habermas, Viktor Orbán invited Patrick Deneen…and we liberals erected some sort of artificial cordon sanitaire between the vita activa and vita contemplative of politics.
That’s I have always advocated for bringing together the smartest minds and the most celever politicians in the liberal tradition. For that, we don’t need another Mont Pèlerin, Gummersbach will do.
Liberal Community: This is a final question and a personal one - you are a European trotter, born in Germany, doing a PhD n the United Kingdom, and you spend lots of time in Turkey. Also, you lived for a while in Eastern Europe. Let us imagine you are Alexis de Tocqueville, it is just a thought experiment, and you plan to write a book about what strikes you as a liberal mind in the many countries you visited. What would be in the first chapter?
Sven Gerst: I love this question. I always viewed travel and observational skills (i.e. what the Germans call Beobachtungsgabe) as essential to sound political theorizing. After all, the analysis of the intricate interplay between political institutions and social behavior demands a lot of contextual deconstruction in order to be meaningful.
But (as usual) I digress.
What would be my first chapter? Tocqueville starts “Democracy in America” with a rather odd chapter on the external configuration of North America. In contemporary terms, I would read this an attempt to do geopolitics. So, if I took on the Tocquevillian project today, I’d start with the “Geopolitics of Liberalism.” And here I would map and reflect on the alliance of liberal democracies all around the world—from the United States to the Netherlands and Germany to Taiwan.
And looking at this particular setup, we could immediately see the full spectrums of the two challenges that liberalism faces today: The domestic challenge of populism and the international challenge from geopolitical actors, such as China or Russia: While Taiwan doesn’t suffer from the internal division of populist discourse, it is constantly threatened by the looming threat of a Chinese invasion. Meanwhile, the United States are not threatened by any external aggressor; but is internally more divided than ever. Now, in Europe we struggle on both fronts: We are literally attacked by a predatory regime and (at the same) time the populists are undermining our own liberal democratic foundation.
I guess that enough for 1000+ pages of Tocquevillian investigation, right? Now, I’m not a French aristocrat, so I just need the time and money to do that. So, if one of your readers is interested to support me, “my DMs are open”, as they say.
Liberal Community: Many thanks indeed for sharing your thoughts with Liberal Community.
Peace,
SG