How to be a liberal

How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its for Survival, by Ian Dunt (Canbury Press, 2020).

I have a fascination with British politics that I cannot explain. Perhaps it’s because I believe the US and UK are going through some of the same things socially and politically, with movements like populism and nativist politics inflected through our different institutions, cultural norms, and traditions. Looking at them together provides a poorly controlled experiment in the various ways democracies can fall apart. Both used to have well-deserved reputations for seriousness and probity, and now both too often seem like caricatures of themselves. Giving in to the politics of grievance and the war on ‘wokeism’, whatever that means, will do that. So, it’s helpful for those of us in the US to keep track of how our friends and colleagues across the Pond are holding up, if only so we can commiserate, or perhaps to learn from each other’s experience.

I started to follow the UK political journalist Ian Dunt early in the Brexit debate, and found his commentary both witty and insightful. His live-Tweets (now live-Xs?) of the Brexit debates in Parliament were epic. They demonstrated just how much more creative the Brits are at insults, calling out idiocy and hypocrisy with wit and venom. More recently, he started a podcast with Dorian Lynskey called Origin Story, which is one of my favorites. While taking a more measured tone than his Tweeting and podcast, How to be a Liberal does not disappoint. It’s a readable summary of how we got to our current state of political disfunction, and what’s at stake, by keeping a sharp focus on the origins of the philosophical grounds of liberal democracy. His use of the word ‘liberal’ is in the UK sense, or the more philosophical sense of the liberal tradition, not the US usage of ‘liberal’ where the word has become an empty insult drained of meaning. That is, Dunt is interested in the political and social philosophy of Liberalism, that school of thought that balances individual rights and responsibilities, with the powers of political and social institutions — aka the bureaucratic state — that ideally are supposed to protect and forward those rights. As the history of Liberalism shows, balancing those two things, freedom of the individual and the power of the state, is never easy, and each generation it must undergo renegotiation.

Dunt does a good job of recounting that history, staying on point while ferreting out parts of the story that are less familiar. The French Revolution, its early promise and later excesses, especially the pitch into violence, are covered. Yes, he covers John Locke, but he also talks about the Levellers. Yes, he discusses JS Mill, but also Helen Taylor, Mill’s lover and fellow political thinker. The political impact of disruptive information technologies is summarized, from the printing press, to broadcast radio and television, and now social media. In each case, the social impacts were not foreseen by the inventors or early adopters, turned out to be revolutionary, and they have been long-lasting. One of the later chapters includes an admirable summary of the contributions of Isaiah Berlin and his theory of values pluralism.

Dunt is a journalist, not a professional historian, so I’m sure much is left out or summarized in a way that specialists might find lacking in rigor. Fair enough. While we’ve all lived through those tumultuous times, it helps sometimes to step back and read a summary of that recent history, embedded in the larger context of how we got here. That helps us see how certain patterns start to emerge, and those that Dunt identifies are alarming. He is not the first to sound the klaxons about the current drift away from liberalism toward illiberal political systems, nor the first to call out the hubris of the last generation of intellectuals, some of whom, with the end of the Cold War, had slipped into the comforting illusion that historical struggles over political systems were finally coming to an end, and liberal democracy had won. Now too many are writing liberal democracy’s obituary. Such defeatism is lazy. Dunt reminds us how the Liberal project, i.e. the creation of systems of government and the nurturing of a public-spirited politics, can embody an otherwise mythical social contract, one committed to human liberty and flourishing. Flawed as they might be, such systems are worth defending.

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