Double Betrayal.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren
• Position: Review

Is liberalism its own worst enemy?

The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 248 pages, $28.95/$14.95 paper

In the long march from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, liberalism has undergone a personality change--several, in fact. Originally a political philosophy predicated on safeguarding the individual from unwelcome intrusions, especially intrusions by an overbearing state, eventually it transmogrified into the view that the only way individuals can be adequately protected from each other and from themselves is via a large and ever-growing batch of state interventions. This transformation is now an old and familiar story. Less often recounted, though, is the corresponding transformation of opposition to liberalism. What is it to be an anti-liberal today? Is it to reject the primacy of individual rights in favor of the claims of tradition and community, or is it to affirm those rights against a century of distortion? The evidence of this collection is that it is both, and that the combination is fundamentally incoherent.

It is appropriate that a volume wrestling with itself should carry an ambiguous title. Is "the betrayal of liberalism" a betrayal carried out on liberalism or one carried out by liberalism? If the former, then liberalism is the disfigured victim; if the latter, it is the perpetrator. The 10 essays contained herein are split; some identify liberalism as the aggrieved party and some as the culprit, and a couple confusedly stumble back and forth, certain that there's something in the political atmosphere that doesn't smell right but unable to identify the offending scent. That a compilation of independently prepared essays manifests a variety of viewpoints is unsurprising, but here we have pieces all of which first appeared in The New Criterion, a major intellectual outpost of the new right, and which are advertised by the editors as deployed against a common foe. If a coherent conservative philosophy isn't to be found here, then it likely exists nowhere.

For former Thatcher adviser Roger Scruton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the primordial snake in the Edenic garden of traditional civil society. By insisting on holding up the credentials of ancestral institutions to rational scrutiny and justification, Rousseau began a process of undermining their authority, the costs of which are ongoing and incalculable. For Rousseau and his successors, that which has not been grounded in first principles known to reason has no claim on the allegiance of thinking, self-directed people. Obeisance to traditional forms of life is an unworthy intellectual servitude we must throw off. Familiarity does not count in favor and novelty does not count against, so the efforts of enlightened social engineers to improve old ways are to be welcomed. And if the suggested alterations are radical rather than reformatory, sweeping away venerable customs in the name of progress, well, all the...