The reclamation of liberalism
by John H. Weston
It was the uncompromisingly anti-communist Richard Nixon who opened the
United States and then-Communist China to one another. It may yet be the
hawkish Ariel Sharon, backed by the obdurate George W. Bush, who will bring
something like peace between Israel and a Palestinian state. And the reclamation
of liberalism—as a concept and as a respectable political position—whose
work will that be? Very possibly the Reaganesque conservative Fareed Zakaria.
If he succeeds, he will do so while sounding astonishingly similar to the
late Unitarian Universalist theologian, ethicist, and democratic socialist
James Luther Adams (1901–1994).
The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.
By Fareed Zakaria. W.W. Norton, 2003; $24.95. |
Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, became an inescapable
voice in international affairs with his Newsweek essay in response
to the events of 9/11, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?”
Not that he had been inaudible before. A member of one of Calcutta’s
power families, with degrees from Yale and Harvard, he was Foreign
Affairs’ youngest editor ever. And he is a conservative, as
this account of himself in his recent book The Future of Freedom:
Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad makes clear:
People often say, “How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?”
Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things people don’t
understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces
masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to
be seen to be believed.
The second is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial
village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach
for an oxygen mask.
Contrast Zakaria’s marker experiences—the socialist corruption
of Calcutta and stifling village life—with Adams’s. Nourished
as well as confined in his early years by what one commentator describes
as the “intense, disciplined community” of the fundamentalist
Plymouth Brethren, Adams embraced humanism as a young man in response.
In 1927 he was ordained a Unitarian minister. And then, in a year of study
in the fascist Germany of 1935-36, he encountered as stifling a national
community as has ever been. He returned to the United States convinced
that liberalism—in religion and in politics—needed vigorous
renewal, especially in its institutional forms, in order to combat the
growth of anti-liberal forces.
Adams’s legacy, and his leftward-leaning social thought, permeates
Unitarian Universalism today. A magnetic teacher, from 1936 to 1968 he
taught successively at Meadville Lombard Theological School, Federated
Theological Faculties of the University of Chicago (of which Meadville
Lombard was then a member institution), and Harvard Divinity School. After
retiring from Harvard in 1968, he taught at Andover-Newton Theological
School. His students, and students of his students, pervade the Unitarian
Universalist ministry. (The present reviewer, one of the latter, is indebted
to Professor J. Ronald Engel of Meadville Lombard, one of the former,
for a clarifying recent conversation about Adams.)
Throughout his long career, Adams sought to describe and to create the
necessary conditions for a community in which individuals—all individuals—could
thrive, a community in which both freedom and power were distributed so
dynamically that those without freedom and power could gain their legitimate
share, while those with a surplus could be relieved of it. Adams was no
stranger to confrontation, in theory or in practice.
Time and again Adams returned to the root theme: If the market on freedom
and power is not to be cornered by one group or class, there must be vigorous
intermediate institutions. It is not freedom of speech but freedom of
association that is essential. Only if individuals are free to associate
will they be able to create (or resist) change, rather than merely talk
about it. The existence of a multitude of free churches and other “voluntary
associations” is thus an essential condition, in Adams’s view,
to an increase in freedom and its broader distribution.
In the first of several anthologies of his work, On Being Human Religiously:
Selected Essays in Religion and Society (second edition, 1976), Adams
explains that freedom involves more than freedom of choice:
Many people entertain attitudes in favor of freedom, but socially effective
freedom requires participation in associations that define or redefine
freedom and that attempt to articulate or implement that freedom in
a specific social milieu.
By participating freely in groups—or, as Adams liked to put it,
through “the organization of power and the power of organization”—people
embody their freedom. He called this freedom of association “voluntaryism”:
Voluntaryism is an associational institutional concept. It refers to
a principal way in which the individual through association with others
“gets a piece of the action.” In its actual articulation
it involves an exercise of power through organization. It is the means
whereby the individual participates in the process of making social
decisions. The process, particularly when it affects public policy,
requires struggle, for in some fashion it generally entails a reshaping,
and perhaps even a redistribution, of power.
Adams also distilled this idea into a simple maxim: “By their groups
ye shall know them.”
An accessible introduction to Adams’s writings is George Kimmich
Beach’s collection, The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected
Essays and Addresses. In it, Adams explains that the voluntary association
“is a means of dispersing power, in the sense that power is the
capacity to participate in making social decisions. It is the training
ground of the skills that are required for viable social existence in
a democracy.”
It should not be surprising to hear a Reaganite advocate for the same
ends: Conservatives are supposed to hold freedom and democracy
among their dearest values. But when the darling of internationalist conservatives
advocates means to those ends similar to those espoused by one of the
leading lights among Unitarian Universalist social thinkers, attention
must be paid.
According to Zakaria, the crucial problem currently presenting itself
in many corners of the world, including the United States, is the growth
of “illiberal democracy.” Letting people vote, it turns out,
doesn’t necessarily make them free. “Recall that in the fourth
century b.c. in Athens, where Greek democracy is said to have found its
truest expression, the popular assembly—by democratic vote—put
to death the greatest philosopher of the age because of his teachings,”
he writes. “The execution of Socrates was democratic but not liberal.”
Majorities are notoriously dismissive of the rights of minorities. So
the question of the day is, What does it take to create not just democracies,
but constitutional democracies? What does it take to create not simply
nations in which the government is elected by popular ballot, but nations
marked by the rule of law, separation of powers, and the protection of
such basic liberties as speech, assembly, religion, and property? What
does it take to create specifically liberal democracies?
From around the world and from Washington, D.C., the answer comes back:
free and fair elections. Not so! Zakaria responds. Unregulated democracy
is about as likely to be successful as unregulated capitalism. Although
he wrote The Future of Freedom months before the U.S. war with
Iraq, Zakaria’s views of the next steps in that country’s
governance seem implicit in his comments on East Timor and Afghanistan:
“In general, a five-year period of transition, political reform,
and institutional development should precede national multiparty elections.”
And what should happen during the protectorate? Intermediate institutions
must be created, capable of sustaining the rule of law, separation of
powers, and the protection of basic liberties during and following national
elections—precisely the same class of institutions as those advocated
by Adams.
What are such institutions? On Adams’s list would appear political
parties, labor unions, the ACLU, and congregations. Zakaria would point
to political parties, the Federal Reserve (a private entity), professional
associations, and the World Trade Organization. Both would recall Montesquieu
and Madison, who favored systems of checks and balances to prevent the
accumulation of power and abuse of office, and de Tocqueville, who first
observed in the 1830s the essential role voluntary associations have played
as thickening agents of U.S. democracy. And both would identify, in the
gradual thinning out of voluntary associations, the tilt of the United
States, too, toward increasingly illiberal democracy. Zakaria writes:
America’s problems are different from—and much smaller
than—those that face Third World countries. But they are related.
In America, laws and rights are firmly established. The less-formal
constraints, however, that are the inner stuffing of liberal democracy
are disappearing. Many of these social and political institutions—political
parties, professions, clubs, and associations—are undemocratic
in their structure. They are all threatened by a democratic ideology
that judges the value of every idea and institution by one simple test:
Is power as widely dispersed as it can be? Are they, in other words,
as democratic as they can be?
The other common thread in the thought of Adams the democratic socialist
and Zakaria the Reaganesque conservative is its dialectical nature: not
democracy or institutions, but democracy and institutions. Not A or
B, but more A and more B. If political liberalism has
been marginalized and increasingly de-legitimated over the past thirty-five
years or so, it is due in no small part to liberals’ simplistic
emphasis on direct democracy (as it was called in the 1970s) to the exclusion
of the thickening agents of institutionalization, representation, and
delegation. What a wonder if, thanks to Zakaria’s work, social and
political liberalism reclaims the position it once occupied as a nuanced
and muscular strain in American thought.
The Rev. John H. Weston was the minister
of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church of Kansas City, Missouri, before
becoming ministerial settlement director for the Unitarian Universalist
Association in 1998.
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