THE OLD LIBERAL ORDER IS UNDER SIEGE

In the past two weeks, Black Lives Matter has essentially converged with the entire modern U.S. establishment, from academia to the media to corporate leaderships

 

By Gerard Baker

 

The Wall Street Journal

June 5, 2020

 

History mocks us all eventually. It’s the rare pundit or politician who doesn’t find that once passionately held verities are eventually undone by the steady march of inconvenient events.

This week I listened to prominent Republican Never Trumpers—who took the U.S. into perhaps the worst foreign policy adventure in its history, promising to impose democracy in Iraq through the deployment of the U.S. military—as they denounced a president for destroying democracy by threatening to deploy the U.S. military. It brought a bitter smile to my lips.

The main lesson—one that those of us who supported the Iraq war have learned with humility and regret—is that the U.S. military isn’t perhaps the best tool for imposing democracy, in Firdos Square or Lafayette Square.

But an even larger historical lesson is being taught now in the tumult of current events. It resonates across the years to those innocent days when Americans believed in a world that could be united under the banner of a patented liberal democracy that seemed to have triumphed over all other systems and ideologies.

The battle being waged in the country is about many things—race, justice, inequality—but it is at root about the rapidly accelerating unraveling of the liberal consensus. This isn’t a partisan phenomenon, as some people would have us believe; it’s not all the fault of a would-be dictator issuing threats of violent domestic repression from the White House. It’s a broad-based collapse of confidence in the system that America has pioneered, propagated and led for the last half-century.

It’s only by recognizing this deeper crisis that we can understand a particular curiosity in the fight being waged in the wake of the killing of George Floyd last month. On what appears to be the principal point of contention, the nation isn’t really that divided at all.

The vast majority of people in the U.S. seem to agree not only that there was a specific injustice done to Mr. Floyd, captured in the video of that depraved act by a police officer in Minneapolis, but that there is a larger injustice that African-Americans face. A Pew Research poll conducted in late May found that almost two thirds of white Americans thought black Americans were not treated fairly by the criminal justice system.

But the struggle clearly concerns a much more radical disagreement over what this country is and what it ought to be. The protesters proclaim that the injustices are a reflection of “systemic racism,” derived from the original sin of America, and the remedies they propose are revolutionary. The Black Lives Matter movement wants to “defund the police,” redistributing those funds to programs for social injustice.

These arguments have been raging for years, but what’s different about the current climate is the much wider acceptance of the critique and the remedy. In the past two weeks, Black Lives Matter has essentially converged with the entire modern establishment, from academia, to the media, to corporate leaderships. More Democrats for the first time openly expressed support for the movement’s key policy objective. In New York and Los Angeles, controlled by Democrats, city councils are considering measures for steep cuts in police budgets.

This radicalism is a threat to the fading liberal order. One of the new things this week was the sight of major companies across America rallying to the cause of Black Lives Matter, while others found themselves challenged by activist employees. At the New York Times, a revolt by reporters forced the company into an abject renunciation of an op-ed by a leading Republican senator. At Facebook, employees are trying to force their CEO to censor presidential pronouncements they find objectionable.

 

A basic tenet of the old liberal order is the toleration of views we find detestable, not least because airing them enables them to be examined and rebutted. The larger illiberalism on today’s left involves the deplatforming and denunciation of those who won’t sign up for the prevailing orthodoxy.

America now finds itself facing authoritarian nationalism on the one side, led by a Trumpian Republican Party that angrily rejects plurality and deviation, and on the other side, an increasingly illiberal liberalism that compels submission to identity politics.

There was once a comforting hope among some Americans in the political middle ground that the Trump years would mark some sort of aberration, that after four years of a bracing, terrifying experiment, the old order would assert itself. Not anymore. Fasten your seat belts. The order itself is under siege.