Liberalism and Its Contemporary Failure
MA Junjie examines what the liberal movement can learn from populism, how we can ‘localise’ liberalism and why there’s hope, yet.
The maxim for 2016, and possibly 2017, is populism. Various political forces, no matter it’s the National Front in France, PVV in the Netherlands, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, let alone the charismatic Donald Trump, they are labelled “populism” featuring anti-elitism, anti-pluralism, and anti-establishment, regardless of their political standing. As a deteriorated form of democracy, Jan Werner Muller argued in his What Is Populism that, populist political forces are capable of governance and rule of constitution which defies the common conception. How do they do it? Simply by altering the constitution to their favour. Take a look at Venezuela and Hungary. What they did in the constitutional changes was not to limit the power of the government, but to limit the scope of citizens’ liberty.
As many consider populism as the nemesis of the current global liberal movement, the liberal clan is at war with itself. Just like populism, liberalism comes in many shades. Fifty leading “liberal” scholars come together and discuss the liberal agenda, you can bet the first several exchanges would be about the definition of liberalism. Some even dread upon the word itself, “Excuse me? I am not liberal. I consider myself libertarian.” There comes the confusion for common people. Typologies are points of view, and only a Baconian would consider human typologies exist already in nature. Therefore, the sophistication of further development of sub-branches of liberalism should not defy the contemporary efforts to fight for the same cause, that is the liberty of humankind. As artificial as typologies are, friends of liberty need not worry that their gigantic differences would hinder their odd in the struggle against populism and other forms of anti-liberty forces, be it the government, market monopoly, or the evil components of human nature. These differences would look minor compared to their counterparts on the other side of the liberal movement.
The division within the liberals is not the biggest issue. An established systematic ideology, like communism, would have failed to unify all its decibels around the globe, let alone a philosophy that’s largely founded upon individual freedom and pluralism. So where do the liberals fail?
To spot this failure, one needs to look at the success of the opponent, that is populism. The world does not go off track all of a sudden. There is no such thing as abrupt social changes. Even the collapse of the former Soviet Union exhibited revealing signs before the fateful Christmas of 1991. Where populism has won lies the failure of liberals. So, populism forces exploit people’s disappoint of slow but rational remedy for social problems, manipulate constituencies by the information asymmetry, and dedicates itself to poking holes in the establishment’s programs. And yet, they CAN govern, much to our disgust. Therefore, liberals should not expect the natural order to take hold gradually and reveal to the people of an epiphany. Alas, there’s the happy ending! No! Nothing changes if nothing changes. Populist political leaders in democracies may have a modest edge over the “establishment” in terms of approval rate, but in non-democratic countries, they all claim to be overwhelmingly successful in winning over their people. It can’t be that sixty percent, of seventy percent of the people in the world, or as in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case 86.8 percent, are intellectually-challenged.
There are many ways to salvage liberalism’s failure, and a universal one is to localise liberalism. Localisation of liberalism may come in the form of privatisation in the 1960s’ Sweden, opening-up and reform in the 1970s’ China, and private schools in 2000s’s India. But the essence is to localise the fundamentals of liberalism and disseminate the communicable ideas into initiatives of the civil society, policy-making of the government, and daily thinking of the common people. If the British liberals think it’s their fight to have halted the Brexit, then perhaps they should have shed some light upon the fact that the sovereignty submitted to the EU was no less than that to the NATO. If the American liberals think their incumbent president is not worthy of the people’s trust, then perhaps they should put aside their elitist smug satisfaction and take the debate over the benefit of globalisation and labour division to the common people. If the Chinese liberals think there is smaller and smaller room for freedom of speech, they should start writing in English and waiting for the domestic official media to translate their opinions back into Chinese. Like I do.
All these we liberals have done, and yet we fail big time. Why? Because we ignore the most important factor of the equation, that is the people. The subjects of populism are not something liberals should avoid. It does not diminish our righteous stance to engage the same group of people who voted for Trump or thought the Eurocrats are earning more than the just salary. The Eurocrats are overpaid and Trump’s idea of cutting tax is benefiting the business. It does not belittle us to explain that South Korea is China’s biggest import resource and third biggest export destination(excluding Hong Kong), and that’s why the Chinese government should be held accountable for manipulating the people to protest against South Korean companies, and vandalise South Korean supermarkets. As Muller wrote in his book, “populists do not claim ‘we are the 99 percent.’ What they imply instead is ‘we are the 100 percent’.” In this light, liberals don’t stand a chance if they don’t speak to the 100 percent of the people. Of course, we liberals are 100 percent of the people, if not THE 100 percent.
To illustrate, famous Chinese historian Wu Si said, “if we frame the rightist thinking as pro-property rights, pro-rule of law, and pro-pluralism, then there’s little left for the leftists in China. And that means the self-claimed leftists are not real leftists at all.” In the Chinese context, the rightists sound a lot like liberals, and I would use it as an equivalent of liberals. This was reaffirmed by famous economist Professor Sheng Hong when he lamented that there had not been any real debates between “rightists” including himself (though he does not identify himself according to political standing) and leftists in years, and all the leftists embraced the same fundamental elements of liberty, such as private property rights, rule of law, and surprisingly, republican democracy.
To sum up, as claimed by liberals that the tricks of populism, such as promises of quick solution to social problems that won’t work, or the uncertainty that will cause implosion of the populist establishment, are easy to debunk, then it’s time to debunk them and engage the people effectively. How to do it concerns strategies, and these strategies vary in different countries. That’s why localisation of liberalism should be a top priority. If it gets up on its feet where it falls, depending on how capable liberals in all the countries are, then we can hold our breath that the liberal movement will prevail eventually, before there is none.
