A decade ago, on the first occasion that I ever heard Leon Wieseltier speak, he uttered a phrase that I have been thinking about ever since. Leon confessed he suffered from what he called “historical envy” because his mentors — giants like Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, and Gershom Scholem — had fought epoch-altering battles for liberalism and they had won. The world these men bequeathed him was better than the one they had themselves inherited. Leon said he had been born too late, that he had missed the fight.
I have been his student for ten years and in that time I have marvelled at how little I relate to that sentiment. I do not have historical envy, not in that sense. I have never wanted for opportunity to test my mettle. If the world is worse when I leave, it will not be because the distinction between good and evil was unclear or because I lacked occasion to oppose naked, government-sanctioned cruelty. I will ask myself whether I was brave, effective, or savvy enough to make strides forward but I will not wish for occasions to try.
Leon’s historical envy has been especially on my mind this past week because we spent some days of it in Mexico City at a conference with leading liberal intellectuals from around the world to together consider the mistakes, victories, and prognosis of the liberal world order. This encuentro mirrored in style and commitments another which had been held thirty-five years earlier in the same place, from August 27 through September 1, 1990. On the first day of this year’s encounter and sporadically throughout the rest of our time in Mexico much mention was made of the fact that, of the attendees who had been at that first conference, only Leon and Enrique Krauze — our host — were in attendance at this one. Thirty-five years and an entire world separated the first encuentro from the second. Octavio Paz, whose image hung literally and figuratively above our heads throughout our time in his city, had presided over the 1990 session. Daniel Bell had been there, as had Irving Howe, Leszek Kołakowski, Adam Michnik, Czesław Miłosz, Alejandro Rossi, Tatyana Tolstaya, Isabel Turrent, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many others. The ghosts of Leon’s teachers and lost comrades were teeming in the air. We were conversing with those who were not present as much as those who were. 1990 was quite a year for liberalism. It was difficult to shake the impression that the optimism which had suffused those rooms had been misplaced or that today’s liberals had squandered our luck. We had reason for shame. Self-flagellation was common and warranted.
At the first of the panels held last week, Paul Berman, one of the American attendees who speaks fluent Spanish and who had himself lived for a time in Mexico, described the terror metastasizing in his home city, New York, in which Mexican waiters, servers, and chefs work in a condition of debilitating fear while the whites in the front of the restaurants in which the Spanish speakers toil go about their days blind to the alternate reality which roils around them. He explained that liberalism, before it is anything else, is a philosophy which asserts universal equality. There are political implications of that faith but while that fundamental truth is being every day subverted by the most powerful entity in the world, liberals have a responsibility to remind themselves and everyone else that our power derives first and foremost from the inalienability of universal equality and the rights it confers.
It was fortifying to spend sessions listening to formidable men and women explain why, precisely, we believe what we believe, and to be reminded of the stakes of those beliefs and the price we have paid and are paying and will pay if we fail to defend them.
Because I was, by at least a decade-and-a-half, the youngest participant at this conference, the values which I and the other participants share and which we had assembled to defend are tinctured for me with a radicalism that seems natural to me, but which was itself discomforting to them. They seem wary of their own radicalism and despair because they feel that radicalism is a departure from liberalism. But it isn’t. The leaders who taught me to be a liberal developed their liberalism in a world in which they were winning and so they came to the conclusion that liberalism itself was incompatible with radicalism. There was no need for it. Their liberalism was fundamentally calm and equanimical, and they assumed that this was a matter of ideology and not circumstance. They believed that liberalism itself was moderate. But over the last decade and a half, they have come to the conclusion that liberalism demands urgency. This required a temperamental rearranging for them, but it is the configuration of liberalism with which I have always been familiar. The most powerful institution in human history — the American government — has transformed itself into an engine of bigotry and the democratically-elected President of the United States is using the power of the presidency as a wrecking ball against the liberal world order. The entire world is watching us devolve with great attention. I knew this was true intellectually, but it was jarring to listen as Spanish speakers in Mexico City repeated again and again that America had turned its back on liberalism and so liberalism itself had been proven untenable. Calm in the face of this crisis would be symptomatic of either stupidity or moral depravity. We must have the courage of our convictions. This is a matter of principle but it is also a matter of strategy: the electorate is not stupid or blind. The American people, like the rest of the world, can see that our government has no respect for humanity. America deserves a liberal leadership that is not toothless in response to our national perversion.
We must be capable of physical and intellectual courage. One of my fellow panelists at the closing session was the war correspondent David Rieff. He has spent most of his career traveling to war zones, analyzing then explaining them to Americans. He had just come from Kyiv. David predicted with chilling sobriety that the century ahead will be much like the first half of the 1900s: authoritarianism will flourish and so will war and the intoxicating, libidinal hatred which fuels armed conflict. As illiberalism ripples in bloody waves across the globe, violence will become increasingly commonplace. We must gird ourselves, especially because even the most committed liberals forget their liberalism in war zones. David reported that, of all the wars he had witnessed, only two militaries had fought fairly. I will never forget the look in his eyes when he uttered that human beings lose their minds when they kill another person, that temporary insanity is the only state in which one soul can snuff out another. As that madness becomes a constant feature of modern life, liberalism must insist on its philosophical truth.
I am going to Israel in a few weeks to spend time in the West Bank helping to protect unarmed Palestinians from Israeli settler terrorists. As a liberal and a Zionist this is my duty. But when I go home at the end of this trip and return to my desk and put pen to paper, I will have to explain the visceral sense of injustice which overwhelms my fellow activists and compels them to endanger themselves. I will have the responsibility to defend my choices according to a worldview which insists that, no matter whether or not any governing body has the authority or interest in respecting it, Palestinians are no less human than Israelis. It is my duty as a liberal to articulate that truth just as much as it is my duty to expend time and fear in service to it. We have to explain the horrors we are living through and we have to explain what those horrors demand of us. That is what liberalism requires.