It is a dreary world, gentlemen. GOGOL The most consequential event of our time, I pray, will be the heroism of the Ukrainians. Here are men and women fighting and dying for liberal democracy. It was beginning to seem as if such a thing were no longer possible. Worse, no longer desirable. Here in the West, Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. We have just been through years of contempt for liberal democracy, and the great disparagement is hardly over. We have been told that everything bad in our age is the fault of liberalism, or worse, neo-liberalism, whatever that is. It has been blamed for just about all the unhappiness in the world; and so the peddlers of a new happiness gloatingly call themselves post-liberal, on all sides of the rotted ideological spectrum. Sometimes one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the intensity of the hatred for liberal democracy: do these fools really understand what they are saying? And then Vladimir Putin, with perfect candor about his lack of scruple and an inhuman absence of shame, attacked Ukraine. The question of his motivation is murky, like everything about this dead little man; there are those who attribute his war to strategic considerations and those who attribute it to mystical ones. Yet Putin’s objective could hardly be more plain: it is to stop the spread of liberal democracy, which in recent years has been exhilaratingly identified with the political evolution of Ukraine. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin fears nothing more than sharing a border with freedom, which has a way of getting through barbed wire. One of the most striking features of the discussion about the war in Ukraine is how little the anti-liberal left and the anti-liberal right have contributed to it. The left does not support Russia, of course; but it does not support American support for Ukraine either, at least not with its customary relish. What the Ukrainians can expect from the progressives is an airlift of thoughts and prayers. I suspect that what really outrages them about Putin’s invasion, even more than its war crimes, is that it might beget an increase in the American defense budget; or worse, a revival of “the Washington foreign policy establishment” and “the Washington elite,” by which they mean anybody who holds a view contrary to theirs. This is populism as national security policy. In recent decades progressives have been more fascinated by Islam’s martyrs than by liberalism’s martyrs. They certainly do not look favorably upon the new activism of American foreign policy that has been engendered by the Ukrainian war. In their view, American foreign policy should be nothing more than a commemoration of the Iraq war unto the end of time. Our disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan was celebrated as precisely such a tribute to our post-Iraq wisdom. And now Putin comes along and spoils things. Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in! (In fact, the conjunction of events was not a coincidence: our flight from Afghanistan made the moment auspicious for the Russian aggression.) In the curious logic of left-wing isolationism, the danger of Putin’s imperialism is that it may beget American imperialism, since all American interventions are by definition imperialistic. Putin has played into LBJ’s hands, if you see what I mean. And so here is Frantz Fanon, I mean Pankaj Mishra, warning that “Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine have now given” that aforesaid establishment “an opportunity to make America seem great again.” (No, not seem; be.) And here is Glenn Greenwald solemnly reporting Noam Chomsky’s remark that “fortunately” there is “one Western statesman of stature” agitating for a diplomatic solution to the war. That saving giant of diplomacy is Donald J. Trump. The spectacle of Chomsky’s degeneration is delightful. As for the post-liberal right, they are stuck with their admiration of Viktor Orban, who is stuck with his admiration of Vladimir Putin. They all deserve each other. In Poland, at least, even the post-liberals, including some of the prophets whom certain American reactionary intellectuals revere, have been clear about their opposition to the Russian war, but then Poland, for the obvious reason, has always been especially wakeful about Russia. Yet even as the horrors in Ukraine abound, the poisonous post-liberal vapors proliferate. A few months ago I came across a piece by Patrick Deneen, one of the most important thinkers that Hungary has produced, in which he discussed the thought of Augusto del Noce, a twentieth-century Italian Catholic philosopher who wrote probingly about modern atheism, which he interestingly called “natural irreligion.” Deneen said that “Del Noce saw further and better than most of his contemporaries that the great totalitarian threat of our age emanated not ultimately from the dictatorships of so-called communist regimes of the Soviet Union or China, but from the unfolding liberal logic of the West.” A bit of explication: Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were “so-called communist” because communism, in the teaching of the right-wing post-liberals, was at bottom liberalism. Really. Deneen posted that sentence about the totalitarian threat of the West while the Russian troops were massacring Mariupol. They were committing those atrocities, and many others, precisely in the name of the ethnonationalism and the anti-liberalism that these Western reactionaries have been urging upon us. Since the invasion of Ukraine, the writings of these Western ingrates, and for my sins I have read a lot of them, look to me like little more than a symptom of the decadence that they deplore. The West has found a teacher in Volodymyr Zelensky. He is stripping the banality from the truths that we hold to be self-evident; teaching us what we already know but have demoted to cliché and the inertness of civil religion; refreshing our sense of the beauty of our dispensation, all its current grotesqueries notwithstanding. He is a new kind of contemporary hero: the fighting liberal. He has the authority of his courage. When we assist him in his fight for liberal democracy, we are returning
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