Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Against Bloodless Liberalism

    Liam Kofi Bright wrote a very good explanation for why he is not a liberal. It makes a couple of particularly useful points in service of the broader goal of explaining his rejection of liberalism as “unworkable.” Among others,

    1. liberalism is the default setting of politics, even for the Sanders and Corbyn types on the democratic left. They do not question the core liberal premises of democratic politics. Most everyone is a fish, unaware they are swimming in a liberal sea.
    2. liberalism-as-actually-practiced was simply awful anytime it encountered people living on top of land that contained valuable resources, or who could be compelled to harvest sugar or cotton at musketpoint. It was helpful for liberals to argue that such people weren’t really people, or were not yet complete people.
    3. liberalism as a public philosophy emerged alongside a robust debate about individual virtue. The people arguing the foundations of what became liberalism as we understand it today were not indifferent to moral questions.

    Most people who think critically about liberalism understand (2). Perhaps they also remember (3).

    (1) is more contentious, but let us grant the point for now, and I do tend to agree with it anyway. It is also true that many self-described “conservatives” are “liberals” in the sense the Bright means it, they simply have different setting on liberalism’s “inequality” dial than do the liberals of the left.

    Bright describes this as “liberalism warts and all.” He does suggest that most people who protest that they are not liberals should face up to the fact that they are. But he will not, because he is not! His objections to liberalism are three:

    1. separating the public and private spheres is unworkable
    2. capitalism generates inequality as a matter of course, and
    3. the liberalism that produces comfy livelihoods for some seems to always coexist with exploitation (you cannot name a counterexample).

    I think that there is a coherent liberal response to the first of these objections, and I suspect that that response also gets you some of the way towards the other two, although I have not seriously thought out the details of that.

    At issue is the question of whether or not liberalism can separate public and private spheres. Here’s Bright:

    I think the state has to in fact take a side on contentious issues, there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort (and nor does the liberal historical compromise just so happen to constitute the ideal moral position, as perfectionists bizarrely convince themselves). What made it seem plausible that this was a solution to the problem of the wars of religion was that in fact very substantive consensus did exist among the various dominant Christian sects, and where that agreement wasn’t there they didn’t really feel the need to respect the rights of outsiders (go back and reread Locke’s letters on toleration if you don’t believe me). Or, at least, substantive consensus existed among the restrained class of people that liberalism was willing to consider full persons worthy of consideration. Now we have expanded that class massively, as we surely must, and perhaps with broader social changes bringing more diversity, it is simply no longer tenable to seek to govern in light of a minimalist neutrality. What I think it leads to are just bad faith illusory politics where people must pretend procedural objections when really substantive objections are at stake. Hence lots of absurd claims that bigoted opinions somehow aren’t really opinions and so not covered by free speech protections. Or indeed the constant temptation on the political centre to make any debate into a metadebate about the free speech right to engage in the debate itself, rather than just having the argument they wish have against some point of left-liberal consensus. 

    His diagnosis of the problem is correct, but that the idea that this is a problem for liberalism rests on the presumption that liberalism could ever be bloodless or sterile. By this I mean, that it could be grounded on some pre-political consensus of what values were worthy of toleration, from which one could then derive principles that we could use to write rules for how a collection of individuals would govern themselves.

    An alternative is to just abandon this whole charade (which Bright also thinks we must do) and to accept that liberals are engaged in an argument about values, and that arguments about procedures will always be grounded in arguments about interests. William Riker* understood this, and many anti-liberals do too. Liberals might own up to the fact that values like bodily autonomy are not inherent moral values for most people. And hence, liberals are engaged both in the construction of systems that protect bodily autonomy and in the cultivation of citizens who hold such values.**

    Perhaps some liberals want to believe that there is a bloodlessly pre-political way of constructing a state, but no one else does. Every other theory of the state embodies some sense of either the common good or some normative claim on whose values are the correct or admissible ones. Let liberals propose a set of values too, disagree internally about what exactly they are, and defend their politics as an ongoing project with no fixed endpoint rather than as a normative ideal.***

    There two loose ends here, however. One is that an argument against liberalism does not provide much guidance on what ought to replace it. Writes Bright,

    We cannot have a neutral public sphere and nor would the greater good just so happen to coincide with what liberals say the neutral public sphere looks like. 

    Point taken. But I cannot imagine what kind of human organization would give us a better foundation for society than the perspective that we ought not assume that we can know what anyone else wants. This is kind of like the ur-fact about human collectives, and embracing that has been tremendously beneficial to a lot of people.

    The second loose end is liberalism as a theory (normative or otherwise) of world politics. Embedded liberalism, as Sara Goodman and I recently argued, had exclusionary foundations. The history of liberalism as a global political project has been terribly disappointing for most people (although comfortable if you happen to be an American). These are facts. I still don’t yet know if I understand their implications for liberalism as a normative theory of politics in any one country.

    NOTES

    * Political scientist, not Starship first officer.

    ** I maintain that this is consistent with Bright’s endorsement of liberalism’s “nominalist vibe,” which I also share.

    *** This is where I think a “punch-throwing liberalism” offers a response to Bright’s second and third objections.

  • Here’s Why Mearsheimer’s Realist Take is So Exasperating

    Isaac Chotiner recently interviewed John Mearsheimer, one of the most prolific realist international relations theorists of our time, on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His analysis has turned a lot of heads. Here are just the first two paragraphs of Mearsheimer’s commentary:

    I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, where afterward nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just nato expansion. nato expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat….If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of nato, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.

    There is a lot to unpack here, and a lot more at the link above. Most everyone who I know expresses something between exasperation and outrage at Mearsheimer’s stance that it is the US and NATO which bear the blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are too many responses to tally them all.

    My take is going to be a bit different. I will not offer any defense of NATO or US decisionmaking on ethical grounds, nor a criticism of Russian invasion on humanitarian grounds (although I’d happily do both of those things somewhere else). I think the core problem with Mearsheimer’s analysis is that realism, as a paradigm of international relations theory used by scholars and policymakers to make sense of geopolitics, conflates description with prescription. People want realism to be a theory of how the world actually works, a theory of how the world should work, and a theory of what should we do given how the world works, all at the same time. Mearsheimer confuses these perspectives too, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unwittingly.

    This is why smart and well-meaning people ask Mearsheimer, and his theories, to evaluate questions like “who is responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine?” and look for responses which are different than “Vladimir Putin, the person who ordered the invasion.” Realism promises an analysis of objective material capabilities, state interests, and structural incentives that suggests that there are deeper causes of things than individual decisions made by state leaders. Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, in this analysis, because he “had to,” because something “forced him” to do this.

    Enter Mearsheimer. He argues that Russia has core security interests, and that the United States and its NATO allies (together with EU)* threatened those security interests when they could have chosen instead to maximize Russian security by ceding to Russia the right to make decisions that it saw as compatible with its own security interests. To the extent that the logic of Russian existential security includes “neighboring countries cannot be liberal democracies” then we should not have provoked Russia on this point. Doing so is our mistake. Putin follows incentives derived from state interests; the Allies deviated from how the world actually works, ignoring Putin’s incentives, and making NATO/EU enlargement decisions based on some other set of non-realist considerations. The result is war. That is Mearsheimer’s argument.

    And it is a cogent argument, as far as it goes. We can query the analytical system that Mearsheimer constructs, asking “who is responsible for this war,” and we can get an answer: “the Allies, not Russia.” And a policy prescription: “don’t try to mess with Russia’s sphere of influence, and you will avoid war.” But this is an analysis that is only so good as its portrayal of the objective reality of the past thirty years.

    I have a different interpretation of what a realist should conclude about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its antecedents. I start from a different premise: Russia is not a great power. It is obviously a declining power, objectively so. Its only claims to global power status are its petroleum reserves, its nuclear arsenal, and our collective memories of the Cold War. Take those away, and Russia is no more a great power than Turkey was in 1935.

    The Soviet Union lost the Cold War decisively. Its empire fell into pieces, its regional alliance disappeared, and most of its former allies joined NATO. Russia lost, and the Western alliance won. Given this, it is not NATO’s responsibility to protect Russian state security interests. It is Russia’s responsibility to give wide berth to NATO, recognizing—as every realist should—that the strong do what they will, the weak do what they must. Russian proclamations that it gets to prioritize Putin’s individual political survival over the logic of international relations are nothing more than idealist fantasies.

    Objectively, no one wants to invade or destroy Russia, there are not and have never been plans for a NATO conquest of Russia. Russia had a good deal: they got to sell their petroleum and defend their territorial integrity with their aging nuclear arsenal. Invading Ukraine was a stupid strategic error made by a declining power that does not understand The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. In the immediate short run, Ukrainians will pay the prices for Russia’s strategic errors, but in the long run, Russia will bear the consequences. It has demonstrated clearly the limits of its force projection capabilities, and united NATO and the EU and a bunch of other hard-hearted neutral states at the same time. As I like to say, if you’ve lost Singapore and Switzerland….

    See how this works? One goes quickly from a different premise about what the objective facts of the realist world are, and reasons through the questions of “how should the world work?” and “what should a policymaker do.”

    Lots of people object to realist analyses because they lack a clear moral position on violence and individual liberty. I share these views. But I also despise this realist way of thinking because it is so indeterminate, and because it leads to statements about what states’ security interests which are, I think, either vacuous or hopelessly subjective.** And that is why Mearsheimer’s take is so exasperating.

    Notes

    * I think a good term that refers generically to NATO, the EU, Japan, and other leaders of the effort to punish Russia for its invasion is “the Allies.”

    ** In what possible sense is the level of democracy in Ukraine a threat to Russian state interests? It is a threat to Putin himself. Putin is not the state, as Waltz would have put it.