Solvent

Something recent in threads on Bluesky, an (in my judgment) ill-considered, typo-ridden moment of dudgeon from somebody I like, U.S. politics historian Rick Perlstein, worth paying attention to for (and despite) what’s wrong with it:

This isn’t a post for chastising Perlstein, let me say, though certainly it’s about disagreeing with him. (Which naturally we can do without picking apart minutely.) The thread is someone whom I generally trust waxing ranty on ‘social,’ nothing more. My happening to find it stimulus to a post on this site obviously lends it no new weight.

Further down this post I’ve included video from Vlad Vexler, a January item that pairs well with Perlstein above, for deepening the disagreement-without-animus. But let’s enjoy something borrowed from one of Perlstein’s Bluesky respondents before we head there: Phil Ochs’s ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal,’ 1965 / ’66, with which I have to admit to being pretty unfamiliar if I had heard it (as seems probable) once or twice before now.

Replying, evidently in a bad mood, to the person who’s posted Ochs’s song, Perlstein declares it ‘stupid.’ But he doesn’t dispute the point it’s clear the response intends. The sort of American-lexicon authoritativeness Perlstein seems momentarily to believe should secure the word against controversies of meaning is too easily undercut in reality; and what denials he musters are weak. The very things about our own 2025 situation Perlstein’s impulse to a bit of thread-rant springs from — a yet more openly contemptuous, conscience-free right firmly in power in Washington than confronted self-identifying U.S. liberals then, particularly — tell plainly just how near we are to the cultural and linguistic context of the American 1960s (and for that matter of the American 1930s, the American 1890s, &c.).

I’ve disagreed elsewhere with Perlstein’s interpretation of aspects of right-wing America of the first part of the last century’s last quarter — the period in which he and I were both children, I actually growing up in the right-wing world he’s made a career of studying. But it’s not (or not much) this territory of disagreement between him and me that concerns us at the moment. In the rant above, Perlstein expects us to take the ‘liberal’ and the ‘radical’ together, tightly linked things by nature. I can follow him in this up to a point, but by no means all the way. On what kind(s) of ground might a good understanding of the two ideas’ being stuck together rely?

We’re in danger here of going too stratospheric for most people’s comfort. It’s a danger I won’t worry too much about trying immediately to sidestep. We’ll see whether I escape in the end. About Perlstein’s ‘shitting on language’ complaint, first, I’ll say further that it’s not really hard to see that he’s asking, or demanding I guess, that this everyday English word work in a way that an awful lot of everyday words don’t work and that we have no obvious cause to think this one should or could. His thread suggests a line of argument for his case — something like that there are historical thresholds to be recognized, our (America’s?) passage over each met with a general acceptance of the word’s semantic progression or evolution, so that except within certain special-usage (e.g. academic) environments, ‘liberal’ always serves us by way of reference to a relatively recent-vintage common appreciation of the ‘frontier’ (insert colonialism dig here) or horizon toward which ‘liberty’ reaches (or from which it beckons?), earlier ones being deprecated, no longer credible. Orient yourself toward the horizon so grasped, everybody really knows, and you’re of the liberal type; away from it, you’re illiberal. The matter is objective. Well, if that is Perlstein’s idea in sum, it’s too flimsy to bother much with. We may or may not come back to it.

I expect my big problem in the present post, in a way, is that I have to own up to wanting to maintain a substantial separation between ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism.’ Not that it’s a difficult point to make, exactly. There are many liberalisms, not one. That’s easy. If amid this multiplicity you discern tradition or derive pattern, inheritance of liberal thought unified or again multiple, as no doubt you can, it isn’t on these only that you draw. You draw also, rather, on observing or encountering something like a diverse material reality of liberal order and the boundaries variously cultivated for its definition and implementation, of evolving liberal-order social condition, of liberal habit of mind, &c. This is harder. It is not hard, however, in the sense that something requiring technical mastery to explain or perform is hard. As I’ve tried before (and will keep trying) to say here and there, what’s in view compares in perhaps many ways with language. You don’t at all have to be a linguist to appreciate accurately, subtly, the fullness of experiential and ideational heft and reach of a language which (by birth or otherwise) you inhabit. You likewise don’t — as, say, an American — have to be a student of e.g. political systems or history to have real insight into the liberal. You’re living it. It’s instantiated in your way of life as English is instantiated in your speech. You can’t help being a kind of authority. Yet this authority isn’t something just brought to bear readily for benefit or advantage by anyone anywhere and all the time. It’s relative authority, always in contest. It evades, it’s contrary. To see this helps a bit, it seems to me, in thinking about — without in any way being simply explanatory of — the persistent demand for some compelling liberalism old or new, for the emergence and play of liberalisms. One thing (I don’t say the only thing) a liberalism does is justify, render conscionable.

Implicit in what I’m struggling to sketch out here, anyhow, is affirmation that it’s nonsensical to suppose one sees in the liberal, somewhere, anything inherently of radical or left identity, ideals, aims. In America and throughout (and of course beyond) the anglosphere, in reality, wherever liberal order broadly holds, it’s our people on the right, too, who are the liberals, who belong to and express and reproduce a common liberal condition — even in that ridiculous American-right behavior of self-contortion to make the word function as a slur or brand of shame in exaggerated association with projects of the left. There’s sort of a category mistake happening when we would, as Perlstein is at pains to do above, obscure this general and diffuse character of the great liberal-order thing. Which we do, obviously, all the time. I do it. It’s unusual to run into people who don’t. (Our doing it so ordinarily, unselfconsciously, itself illustrates, we could maybe say, something about liberal habit of mind.)

Do I just dismiss then, really, any notion of basic positive relation (not to be read as synonym for fellowship or agreement) between ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’? No, this would be to misinterpret.

But let’s come back to that question too. I promised us some Vexler, and we are coming to him — or to Vexler plus Ignatieff, rather, as the video below is Vexler’s reading-with-commentary of the whole of the eminent Canadian’s essay for January publication in the Washington Post, a week ahead of official inception of the 47th U.S. presidency. Ignatieff’s article opens,

I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of life. We liberals commonly tell ourselves that, unlike the far right and the far left, we reach our beliefs through a rational inspection of the world as it is, but I didn’t get my ideas that way. I didn’t form my convictions through a critical evaluation of evidence about life as it actually was. I was born a liberal.

We should remark briefly on some striking superficial likeness in these lines with things I am saying or am anyway attempting to say. With Ignatieff, I, too, profess that ‘I was a liberal before I knew anything about the world at all.’ But what I and Ignatieff mean, clearly, are pretty different — counter, even. Ignatieff isn’t going to hold ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ apart as I do, we see right away. Far from it. He intends by ‘liberal’ a sort of centrist tribal marking received in credal form. In my view, it’s wasted breath to charge this word with that value. It doesn’t work. I grew up learning to reject precisely the formulations he grew up learning articulately to subscribe, yet I was at root, I insist, no less a subject of fundamental liberal formation than he.

What perhaps calls for our closer attention, though, comes about 22 minutes in, where Vexler gets to Ignatieff’s glancing invocation of radicality. Ignatieff:

Liberalism in the next generation will need to save social solidarity from the ‘creative destruction’ of the market by rebuilding the fiscal capacity of the liberal state and investing in the public goods that underpin a common life for all. Saying this, at a high level of generality, is easy enough: The tougher part will be finding the language and the cunning to convert a radical liberalism into a politics that wins elections and a governing strategy that pushes change through the veto-rich thicket of interests waiting to derail our best-laid plans.

Vexler, commenting, offers us something useful at this point. The problem Ignatieff puts his finger on, he says, is the center-left-lib politician’s need to ‘return liberatory credentials’ to some place of priority. ‘A very important question’ Vexler declares this, without further discussion, before moving on to spend what turns out to be the greater part of the video on his idea of the threat of ‘wokeism’ and ‘hyper-identity politics.’

The video is a least-favorite for me, possibly, in Vexler’s catalogue. I’m in deep disagreement with him throughout (not to say at every word out of his mouth). I don’t necessarily recommend viewing it. Yet it serves well in an occasion like that which Perlstein’s rant has become here for me, for thinking about the challenge in Perlstein’s ‘Radicalism is almost always liberal’ as, helpfully, you’re urged also to attentiveness to multiplicity in the liberal. Vexler illuminates the off-the-cuff Perlstein — not that we want to imagine Vlad somehow speaking for Rick here — in assuring us (rightly) that Bernie Sanders’ New-Deal-referential social democrat project, for instance, is far from a far-left thing and in asking us at the same time, in effect, to credit his own interpretation of such a project as sign or proof of the emancipatory innate in, always surfaceable from within, the liberal regarded as tradition, the liberal as wrapped around some vital true (if multiple) liberalism.

‘Liberal’ and ‘liberation’ do obviously have etymology in common. Pardon me a facile turn, but maybe it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that that doesn’t tell us anything about how they belong to our parlances of the political. At any rate, I want to say here that in something like the same way I think it wasted breath for Ignatieff to speak of one’s being liberal as tribal identity acquired through happy parentage and professing of creed, I think it also wasted breath for Vexler to speak of ‘liberatory credentials’ inhering in any politics of a given liberalism. Unless, that is, he’s going to move from tell to show — something he seems, in discussion above at least, disinclined to do. It is easy enough to show that outbreaks of emancipation, at points very great ones, have accompanied the several-centuries’ progress of the liberal. The liberal theorist and the liberal politician (right as well as left) frequently make claims of origination and ownership over such outbreaks. It’s just as easy to show that monstrous events of repression, subjection, and mass murder have accompanied as well, all along the way. Over these the liberal theorist and the liberal politician make frequent denials. (I wouldn’t and don’t, though, by the way, suggest that Vexler is someone who so does.)

But if not of the liberatory, is there some relevant other sort of credential we ought to think does principally attach to the practices and thought, political and other, of evolving liberal order? To my mind, the short(ish) answer for us here is a Yes: the relevant expectant certitude we have — really everybody has — in the liberal is in its working elements’ design for, its systemic effectiveness in, the weakening and undoing of societal terms of civic and social bond, with their role dependencies and lines of functional authority providing ‘place’ for persons, so that forms of interrelation rapidly (relative to one or another historical referent) lose weight and give way to alternatives often new and of varying source and sturdiness.

Which is of course basically to say nothing unusual, nothing not in various ways common in liberal-culture discourse, if it’s to leave still a whole lot unsaid, untouched. You get something of this picture, at any rate, in the Ignatieff essay for instance. Ignatieff hints there at linkage between this dissolve & churn principle I advert to and capitalism (under the name of ‘neoliberalism’) — again not remotely a novel sort of thing to say. Ideologues of the right, too, notably ‘paleocons’ and ‘post-liberals’ to a degree influentially in circulation today, will in some way finger capitalism on the same grounds. (In a way that’s much too oblique, too confusing, I note, Vexler acknowledges something about developments in this vein on the right with his ‘left on economy, right on culture’ characterization of new breeds of democratically defective politician. It exemplifies for me how disappointingly crude his picture of things left can be.) By no means do you have to be a Marxist to get the capitalism connection.

update (apr 6)Ludwig von Mises, libertarian icon, represents another well-known forthright identifying of the liberal with capitalism (a form of thinking, the ‘classic liberalism’ school, Perlstein’s thread names in order to label as fringe). Since the present post went up last week, von Mises’ work originally published 1927 in Germany as Liberalismus has occupied some space in my head. Its 1962 U.S. publication in English was under an alternative title, apparently from concern about the word’s shifting associations. A later edition reverts this to Liberalism. Today, of course, it’s easy to see the impact of work of this book’s type on liberal-order policy regimes of succeeding decades (ours, that is), especially of the U.S. and its close state partners.More interesting for me has been a new item from the New Books podcast series, a conversation with LSE’s Bruno Leipold about Marx’s own changes of position and the refashioning of left thought vis-à-vis 19th-century liberal (center) and constitutional-monarchist (right) political ideas, wonderfully suggestive of the capacity of words serving the range of political needs ‘liberal’ and companion terms do to both move, with time, and stay anchored in a plurality of historically situated origins.

For my part, I think it good to resist the idea that one might explain the liberal in any basic aspect as reducible to capitalism simply. The liberal isn’t just capitalism. This is hardly however to say that we don’t do well to appeal to Marxists if we’re in want of a good working-purposes sketch of conditions of the liberal’s appearance with late-medieval European upsets and expansions and its now half a millennium or so of unfolding at global scale (by which I don’t mean attribution to it of any sort of total world hegemony in the present). At hand I have Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, something I’m reading for the first time, picked up a few weeks ago. This is from late in the first chapter:

As a civilization of free and equal beings, Europe was as much a fiction in the nineteenth century (and later) as its very unity had been during the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. Both the church and the more powerful nobilities of the Holy Roman Empire and its predecessor had been the source of the illusion in those earlier periods. From the twelfth century forward, it was the bourgeoisie and the administrators of state power who initiated and nurtured myths of egalitarianism while seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the purpose of their domination. The carnage of wars and revolutions precipitated by the bourgeoisies of Europe to sanctify their masques was enormous.

Eventually, however, the old instruments gave way to newer ones, not because they were old but because the ending of feudalism and the expansion of capitalism and its world system — that is the increasingly uneven character of development among European peoples themselves and between Europeans and the world beyond — precipitated new oppositions while providing new opportunities and demanding new ‘historical’ agents. The Reformations in western Europe and then England that destroyed the last practical vestiges of a transcendent, unified Christendom, were one manifestation of this process of disequilibrium.

In England, as an instance, representatives of the great landowners, and agrarian capitalism, in pursuit of their own social and financial destinies disciplined first the church and then the monarchy and finally ‘the masses’ through enclosures, the Poor Laws, debtors’ prisons, ‘transportation’ (forced emigration), and the like. The contrasts of wealth and power between labor, capital, and the middle classes had become too stark to sustain the continued maintenance of privileged classes at home and the support of the engines of capitalist domination abroad. New mystifications, more appropriate to the times, were required, authorized by new lights. The delusions of medieval citizenship, which had been expanded into shared patrimony and had persisted for five centuries in western Europe as the single great leveling principle, were to be supplanted by race and (to use the German phrase) Herrenvolk, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The functions of these latter ideological constructions were related but different. Race became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and / or extermination of non-‘Europeans’ (including Slavs and Jews). . . . But while we remain on European soil, it is Herrenvolk that matters. In eighteenth-century England, Reginald Horsman sees its beginnings in the ‘mythical’ Anglo-Saxonism that was flown as an ideological pennant by the Whig intelligentsia. . . . Inevitably, of course, the idea was dressed in the accoutrement of nineteenth-century European science. Herrenvolk explained the inevitability and the naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans. . . . Then, in the nineteenth century, modern nationalism appeared.

The emergence of nationalism was again neither accidental nor unrelated to the character that European capitalism had assumed historically. Again, the bourgeoisie of particular cultures and political structures refused to acknowledge their logical and systemic identity as a class. Instead, international capitalism persisted in competitive anarchy — each national bourgeoisie opposing the others as ‘natural’ enemies. But as powerful as the bourgeoisie and its allies in the aristocracy and bureaucracy might be in some ways, they still required the co-optation of their ‘rational’ proletariat in order to destroy their competitors. Nationalism mobilized the armed might they required to either destroy the productive capacities of those whom they opposed or to secure new markets, new labor, and productive resources. Ultimately, the uneven developments of national capitalisms would have horrifying consequences for both Europe and the peoples under European dominations.

We might jump, here, to look toward talk about social-analytical themes of Zygmunt Bauman or Robert Putnam, the catastrophe of the ungrounded individual and so on. (Vexler would be with us in some measure.) But my thoughts these days, influenced especially by recent (limited, unhappily) reading of Priya Satia and Pankaj Mishra, tend to remain there where I leave off with Robinson, in the nineteenth century, the swelling of flows of wealth and of discourses of morality public and private, pervaded with often astonishing violence and new idealizations and incorporations of the violent, that will give lasting shape to the Atlantic-liberal world I’ll be among those turning up in a few generations on (most of my life lived in near proximity to Washington DC itself).

You begin sooner or later (with or without the direct assistance of Freud, say) to wonder at this, the outrageous paradox that any great sociopolitical thing so found in the world, in history, should endure long with such a self-recycling process of intimate destructiveness as we glimpse here apparently at its heart.

In my view, the liberal isn’t something one defends or seeks one’s own destiny ordered to. It’s rather something one lives with, makes possibly some judicious effort to understand as part of oneself as one is part of it, attempts (but fails) to gain critical distance from with opportunity and perhaps a bit of education. (One doesn’t for godssake confuse it for instance with the democratic! Except that one does, constantly.)

But when we’re looking this way at factors in play it’s not so hard, is it, to see that we would come, most of us, to think of the liberal and the radical (or perhaps ‘liberatory’) as going necessarily together somehow? At the least, we might say, something as shockingly prone to recurring societal instabilities as the liberal is, something caught up with trial of ever more cumbersome and unpredictable programmatic solutions (economic, military, constitutional-legal, social-regulatory . . . ) to its own problems of instability as the liberal is, must present a situation of many openings for intervention and initiative to be taken by radically-minded or -persuaded persons, some cases of which will get off the ground spectacularly and even leave their imprint — culturally, politically — on the evolving dominant systemic complex.

There’s a kind of warrant for Perlstein’s perspective (if not for his rant) then, I think we should allow. Even if, as I want to say, they belong and can belong intrinsically to no liberalism, radical and liberation struggles being bound up everywhere with people’s experience of the liberal is something we have good reason as it is to think we should see. I take this observation in the end as occasion for surprise, though, if anything, that someone of Perlstein’s or Vexler’s or Ignatieff’s learning would imagine the liberal the underpinning of any widely shared social or political trust to be built or rebuilt.