I’ve been thinking in broad strokes lately. Not just about the details of how many cops on OPD, or whether we can recall Thao-Price, or what Oakland should do if SCOTUS strikes down Johnson v. Grants Pass.
Important as those issues are, they pale in comparison to the future of liberal democracy, and the threat to it that may well follow the next presidential election. We have to save liberalism, it seems to me, because it’s the only thing protecting us from a mad, religious, anti-human American Taliban.
The threat to liberalism, ironically, comes from, and is a reaction to, the excesses of contemporary liberalism itself. Most Americans approve of a “modified” liberalism that, for instance, allows for same-sex marriage and that disavows overt acts of racism. But when wokeism triumphed over modified liberalism, many Americans decided things had gone too far: hence MAGA. They perceived the truth of Dostoyevsky’s aphorism that “the logic of unlimited freedom is unlimited despotism,” in other words that the demand of the far left for “equal outcomes” and not just “equal opportunity” has thrust liberalism into arenas that are illogical, offensive and, as we see in Oakland, dangerous.
Many liberals have thus joined with conservatives to object to this recent demand for unlimited freedom. The irony of this, as some critics have pointed out, is that, if wokeism is an aberrant form of liberalism, then flushing wokeism out might eliminate the very aspects of America that liberals cherish: freedom of speech, for instance, or privacy, or women’s reproductive rights. Can we eradicate the extremes of liberalism while still preserving the gains of liberalism?
I argue that, yes, we can and should expunge wokeism, with its intolerant nanny-statism, inherently racist ideology, holier-than-thou contempt for the common man, and disdain of common sense, while still preserving the things that liberalism has achieved. I can imagine, for example, an Oakland where wokeism is aggressively weeded out, but that doesn’t mean that MAGAism replaces it, or that we need shed our liberal ideals. It means that we return to a modified liberalism of the kind the Founders intended: in the words of the historian Thomas G. West, “a classical liberal commitment to free markets with republican policies on citizen character formation.”
“Character formation”: That essential building block of liberal democracy has been crucified by wokeism. It’s sad that woke Democrats have ceded the moral high ground concerning character formation to conservatives. But we can reclaim it and, I hope, save liberal democracy.
Steve Heimoff