For instance, a author who appeared overly hopeful in regards to the liberal-revival state of affairs within the first days of the warfare, Francis Fukuyama, has now written a looking out essay for International Affairs on why “liberalism wants the nation” arguing that the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians ought to educate liberals a lesson in regards to the virtues of nationwide identification.
“With their bravery,” he writes, the Ukrainians “have made clear that residents are prepared to die for liberal beliefs, however solely when these beliefs are embedded in a rustic they will name their very own.” The warfare has thus been a partial rebuke to the fantasy of a pure cosmopolitanism, of a liberalism that transcends borders, languages and particular histories. And it’s provided a case research in how the nation-state, its loves and loyalties, can unite a disparate inhabitants round a standard trigger in a means that no supranational establishment has ever been in a position to obtain.
The problem, although, is that the “sense of nationwide objective” Fukuyama is praising in Ukraine conspicuously relies on an exterior enemy, a wolf on the door, and you can not merely will such an enemy into being. (Nor must you want to!) Whereas a lot of the peacetime sources of nationwide solidarity he cites, from meals and sports activities to literary traditions, are considerably thinner issues. And one of many doubtlessly thicker forces, a way of non secular unity inside a liberal order, Fukuyama guidelines out: In a pluralist society, “the thought of restoring a shared ethical custom outlined by spiritual perception is a nonstarter,” main solely to sectarianism and violence if utilized.
However that is perhaps too simplistic. Definitely you can not impose strict spiritual uniformity upon a pluralist democracy. However the liberal order in America, at the least, lengthy relied for solidarity and objective on a softer spiritual consensus, a versatile spiritual middle, primarily based on Protestant Christianity after which increasing to a extra ecumenical however nonetheless biblically rooted imaginative and prescient. From the nineteenth century by means of the civil rights period, this shared worldview provided not only a generic unity however a continuing ethical touchstone for would-be reformers, a metaphysical horizon for the whole American mission.
Right here Fukuyama’s essay is perhaps usefully supplemented by my colleague Ezra Klein’s latest meditation on how Western liberalism seems when seen by means of the eyes of its enemies — that means not simply Putinism, with its spurious Christian justifications for aggressive warfare, however sure radical-right philosophers who’ve rejected liberalism and Christianity collectively, seeing the latter as the unique supply of liberalism’s egalitarianism, its consideration to the poor and marginalized, and its stressed quest for common dignity (all of which they reject and despise).