I don't have an answer to that but I am paying closer attention to what we might call the mass psychological problem - an attachment to fear - liberalism seems to face in the uncertain 21st century. .d.
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(I didn't know what else to call this post. It came reflecting on several others...)
I have some provisional theories, naturally. There is nothing mass about this attachment to fear. You're not afraid. I am not afraid. Nobody I know worries about terrorism. Nobody I talk to during my work day is afraid, except of the Bush administration and what it has done to this country. The treat of a real terrorist attack is considered absurd. It's pure remoteness makes it a phantom.
I think the problem of fear lays elsewhere, in the establishment order itself. This climate of fear issues from the government---precisely because it is the target, not us lowly slobs who mostly don't give a damn. In other words the people in government are afraid and the ruling elite who populate its ranks are afraid.
I want to move to what I think is a related problem.
By any objective sense the judicial branch has come down with truly bizarre rulings that are all clustered around the concept of protecting the government, as if the government needed protection and was under some threat. This judicial mentality isn't exactly a wartime mentality say WWII, but a paranoid mentality, more like the McCarthy era---when the government was theoretically threatened from within. The court system also seems intent on defending business, or the ruling elite proper, as if it were under some dire threat. What is all that about? Who threatens to bring down capitalism as we know it? The few employee plaintiffs who manage to get their pathetic cases heard? These decisions are overkill, crushing the hapless in the name of some phantom bogieman.
What makes no sense at all (at least to me) is the willingness of various courts to protect a chief executive and an executive branch that has directly usurped judicial power for itself and thoroughly run amok with these newly fabricated powers. The only way I understand these judicial decisions is if, I see the judiciary itself as infested with fear.
What the judiciary don't seem to see is that with each absurd finding, they undercut their own legitimacy to hold legal authority. They are eroding their own pretension to rule right out from under themselves. Ever since the Supreme Court found for Bush, they have erased any pretense to blind justice, their goddess at the front door. And with every absurd ruling since, they seem to be digging their own grave---not mine or yours, or liberalism as it is understood by a liberal minded people.
The entire federal government apparatus is in some kind of slow motion melt down. The executive branch is a complete shambles, the military is coming apart from below, because it has completely lost its primary liberal justification as the citizen-soldiery, defending democracy. The army is nothing more than underpaid soldier-thugs and overpaid mercenaries-thugs who defend tyranny and fight in foreign civil wars. The Abu Ghraib photos and the endless non-cases of terrorism held in Guantanamo reveal a deep and systemic corruption of entire US military.
The Congress is certainly a wreck after more than ten years of rightwing authoritarianism. That rightwing bunch has wrought vast internal destruction of the long established Congressional rules of operation and has seen so many cases of bribery, fraud, and political corruption that I have certainly lost track of the count.
So, from my view, liberalism as I understand it is indeed in trouble. But that is so, not because I have lost any faith in it or its grand project of governance---and neither has anyone I know. It it exactly opposite case.
What we are naming a lost of liberalism and enlightenment ideals is nothing of the sort. We the people have lost faith in our government and its political economy, and that awareness is shared and growing, slowly, too slowly for my thirst for redress, but with each year it is growing. The federal government drifts further and further away from its public legitimacy, exactly because it is not following the grand project of liberalism and enlightenment ideals that a significant part of its people hold. In other words, the government and its ruling elite are undermining their own legitimacy to rule. There is no failure of liberalism. There is a failure of government to properly govern.
This is turning into a crisis of government, not a crisis of liberalism.
As far as I can see, the only thing that is preventing a much greater awareness of government collapse of legitimacy is first of all public awareness and insight, that indeed this government is in profound trouble, and second the endless government-media mill that keeps churning out the terrorist fear propaganda to cover up a crisis of legitimacy.
What prevents the public from seeing just how far this government has drifted into an illegitimate tyranny? I think that lack of public insight covers a rather subtle problem of public perception and understanding. Most people who consider themselves liberal don't quite understand that they hold these ideals and principles. The whole core point in democracy is that the people hold the ideals and principles of governance and conduct. No government has ever followed these ideas on its own accord, because governments rule in whatever is the most convenient and expedient way to rule. It is up to the people to make sure these ideals and principle are followed by government. It isn't up to the government. That's the whole point to the constitution, the bill of rights, the system of checks and balances, and the separation of powers.
The best example of what I think of as an inversion of this understanding, or just a misunderstanding---that also lays at the core of this misunderstanding about liberalism---can be seen when people discuss civil rights.
In many people's minds (and certainly on the Right) the whole concept of a right, is some privilege given by government to the people, provided the people behave. That isn't how the concept of liberalism works. It is the obverse case. People have political, civil, and legal rights prior to any governance. Instead of granting rights, the government is prevented from violating them. That's what an inalienable rights means. Rights can not be separated or alienated from the people who hold them. These rights are not entitlements, privileges, or rewards for being good or conforming to some regulation, or for being wealthy and well connected. It is the other way around. Government can not make regulations that violate these rights, and government can not demand conformity to regulations that do violate these rights. And further, government can not chose to obey its own laws only when dealing with some people and not others. Equality before the law, means to apply to rich and poor alike. For example, the commutation of Libby's sentence was a direct violation of equal and impartial justice before the law.
It's the people's job to demand government conform to regulations that embody these liberal principles and ideals.
When the government doesn't embody these ideals, it presumes that political, civil, and legal rights are privileges and rewards and arbitrarily writes laws, makes regulations and makes decrees that mitigate these rights to benefits its political friends and punishes its political enemies. When that is the case, then it is government that is engages in gross misconduct. In doing so, government is undermining its own legitimacy to rule.
And then a last point. At very best, because of a mistaken understanding of political rights, many people, certainly on the right, seem to see the US government through the concept of a theocracy. And at worst, probably close to a majority of people seem to see the political traditions of liberalism and enlightenment ideals as a system of moral lassitude that in fact masquerades as tolerance, but is in effect an amoral system of thought and government practice.
It is religious institutions, modeled on the ancient political tyranny of their own history that indeed provide political rights and liberties as privileges and rewards for approved conduct and of course generously offer them to the most wealthy and powerful donors. Within the theocratic concept of government, it follows that rights are privileges and can be taken away for violations of divine law by those anointed to carry out these laws in the here and now. For example, if you commit enough sins, then you lose your privilege to go to heaven. Technically you earn your privilege to go to heaven in the first place with scrupulous obedience to religious law and by performing various obsequious rituals of submission to divine authority.
If you say bad things in such a state, like Spinoza did, then you can be exiled from the community or worse, put to death. Laws under this system of governance are divinely given and there is no such thing as an unalienable right not to obey them.
The whole direction of religious law issues from an opposite political position to that of secular law. The former are commandments on how to behave directed at the people. The laws in the former system are not prohibitions and limitations on the scope of religious and governmental authority. Under a theocratic system, the point to governance is to command obedience to law and carry out unlimited punishments on the violators.
So to sum up, what we need to understand about what we perceive as a crisis of liberalism and enlightenment ideals of governance is not a crisis in our beliefs and ideals, but a crisis in the legitimacy of our government. The legitimacy crisis has been brought on by government's precipitous drive against its own liberal traditions, and against the commonly and publicly held ideals of governance.
CG