Once a fighting creed, the liberal spirit in America now fights for its life while drawing heavy fire from both sides. Leading intellectuals on the left attack the liberal spirit for conspiring with reactionary forces to preserve racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality and oppression. Prominent figures on the right blast it for fostering selfishness and hedonism, dissolving authority, eroding community, dismantling the family, undermining the nation, and preaching atheism. Neither camp comes close to appreciating the liberal spirit’s role in sustaining the American experiment in ordered liberty.
To make matters worse, the liberal spirit, which transcends much of what distinguishes left and right in the nation, is often confused for this or that partisan outlook. But it is not equivalent to the Democratic Party’s policy agenda and electoral prospects. It is not tantamount to the conviction that government’s principal task is to achieve substantive equality by redistributing wealth and regulating economic affairs. And it should not be reduced to the neoliberalism bogeyman of free-market capitalism, unconstrained international trade, and open borders.
The liberal spirit binds together diverse elements of the modern tradition of freedom. Wide and deep, the tradition includes, to name a few, John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke and James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Raymond Aron, and Frank Meyer and John Rawls.
Upholding the Constitution, administering government, discharging the obligations of citizenship, and maintaining America’s multi-religious, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic republic depend on a variety of norms, sentiments, and virtues central to the liberal spirit. Citizens must recognize each other as free and equal. They must tolerate those who think differently about policy and law, and who worship God differently or not at all. They must speak persuasively in public about matters of common concern. They must listen attentively to fellow citizens and give alternative political views due consideration. And they must exercise their rights responsibly and respect others’ responsible exercise of their rights.
The nation has been doing poorly on these fronts for years, and it shows.
William Galston understands as well as anyone the liberal spirit’s importance to American constitutional government. A Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution senior fellow – following decades as an eminent scholar and teacher of political theory – Galston has written several excellent books that come to the liberal tradition’s defense in an era in which fashionable thinkers on the left and right prefer to marginalize, mock, or malign it. He advances that mission in his short new book, “Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.”
Galston fortifies the liberal spirit by bringing into focus the qualities of mind and character that undermine comity and trust among citizens. His analysis of the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy, among them the naïve illusions it spawns about the perfectibility of human nature and history’s progress toward a world of peace-loving, rights-protecting nations, serves not as an indictment of the regime but rather as an enhancement of citizens’ self-knowledge. His succinct anatomy of the dark passions – “anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination” – is psychologically astute, morally serious, and politically sophisticated. And his exploration of the dependence of a fair and humane politics on persuasive speech – which can inflame the dark passions as well as tame them – illuminates the fraught moment through which America is passing.
Motivated to grapple with the subject by the dark passions shaking the nation, Galston for the most part avoids drawing illustrations from contemporary events. This allows him to develop his argument without arousing partisan indignation or smugness, and to bring home his crucial point that anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination are woven into human nature and present a perennial threat to decency and justice.
But when it comes to the Trump era, the learned and wise analyst of the dark passions succumbs to partisan one-sidedness, inadvertently demonstrating how easily passions subjugate reason and disrupt political judgment.
Consider a few examples from Galston’s compact discussion.
To exemplify rabble rousers who frame elections as “the last chance to save what their audiences hold dear,” Galston cites Michael Anton’s September 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” Published pseudonymously, the title refers to the last of the four commercial airliners hijacked by al Qaeda jihadists on Sept. 11, 2001, to remain airborne. After brave passengers who realized that the hijackers had undertaken a suicide mission stormed the cockpit, the airplane crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania. The essay went viral when Rush Limbaugh read it line by line on his radio show. Anton, as Galston suggests, argued that a Hillary Clinton presidency would spell sure doom for the country while voters who took a risk and voted for Trump at least would give the country a fighting chance. In discussing those who frame elections as “the last chance to save what their audiences hold dear,” however, Galston does not mention the lawless steps that Trump’s opponents – in government, journalism, and social media – have taken since 2016 to block his election and thwart his ability to govern.
To underscore the dangers of substituting violence for persuasion, Galston invokes the Jan. 6 mob of Trump supporters – “armed insurrectionists” in his charged words. Condemned in real time by prominent Republicans, the rioters assaulted Capitol police officers – injuring approximately 174 – as they broke into the Capitol Building, sent legislators scurrying for safety, and roamed the halls for three hours, causing around $2.7 million of property damage and delaying until late that night the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. However, Galston offers not a word about the background against which the Capitol Hill rioters chose violence over speech. In summer 2020, to protest the killing of George Floyd and demand radical political change, anarchists and left-wing protesters, encouraged in real time by Democratic politicians and left-wing intellectuals, lawlessly took over whole city blocks for months, injuring more than 900 law enforcement officers and causing more than $1 billion of damage to commercial property, private residences, and state and federal government buildings.
And to explain the coarsening of citizens’ moral sensibilities, Galston argues that Trump has brought about an era in which “public and private virtue is no longer a necessary condition for trust.” Yet Galston overlooks President Bill Clinton – in whose administration Galston served – who had sexual relations with his young employee Monica Lewinsky in the White House and then falsely denied his rendezvous under oath. At the time, most prominent Democrats blithely set aside “the standard norms of good character” as a condition for holding high office. They insisted that Clinton’s moral lapses and unlawful conduct – infidelity, exploiting a monumental power imbalance between employer and employee, and lying in a sworn statement – should not prevent him from occupying the highest office in the land.
Additional examples of Galston’s side’s contribution to the degradation of American politics are plentiful.
President Clinton and his communications team pioneered “spin” – deceptions delivered to the press with a wink and nod indicating that the president or his spokesperson knew that plenty of journalists were in on the con and could be counted on to uphold it. Such collaborations between a dissembling White House and an obliging press enabled Clinton to survive and thrive, from the “bimbo eruptions” of his 1992 campaign through controversies over “Travelgate,” “Filegate,” and his failed investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation, to the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, the Lewinsky affair, and his December 1998 impeachment and February 1999 acquittal.
Then-Sen. Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 as uniquely qualified and well-disposed to reach across America’s partisan divide. Yet with his February 2009 approximately $800 billion stimulus package and his sweeping March 2010 health-care-reform legislation, Obama resolutely sidelined Republican lawmakers. In addition, in 2009 and 2010, the Obama administration IRS targeted conservative groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, diminishing their ability to participate in politics by hindering their applications for tax-exempt status.
And President Joe Biden, whose team did its best to deceive the American people about his cognitive impairments, delivered an incendiary speech in September 2022 stating that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” To save the republic from the enemies within – a substantial portion of the country, according to his denunciation – Biden abandoned persuasion through speech and took the unprecedented step of using the powers of the presidency in the attempt to jail his principal political rival.
While he obscures the shared responsibility for degrading the nation’s politics, Galston rightly offers the young Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address as “a model of responsible political discourse.” In that speech, writes Galston, “[a] young man without fame or power deployed the only tool he had – his capacity for translating deep reflection into compelling words – on behalf of institutions he believed in.” As the struggle over slavery intensified, Lincoln warned against the threat from within stemming from, in his words, “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.” Galston stresses that “Lincoln had only one proposal to meet this threat – a system of civic education and a civic culture that inculcated such reverence for the Constitution and the laws that the people could be relied on to oppose would-be leaders driven by the desire to dominate.”
The young Lincoln’s proposal remains essential to meeting the threats the nation faces today.
A proper civic education would foster a healthy civic culture. Both would renew the old-fashioned liberal spirit, which appreciates that in a liberal democracy the dark passions typically bedevil one’s own side as well as the other side.