Three accounts of modern liberalism

I have a review essay on that topic in the latest TLS.  Excerpt, on Philip Pilkington:

Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that “liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass on their genes to a future generation”, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non- liberal countries as well – in Russia, for example – where they are lower than in the US. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to “replac[e] the family with the state”? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.

We are told that “deindustrialization eviscerated American industry”, yet US manufacturing output is now barely below its pre-financial crisis peak, and service sector jobs tend to pay more on average today than do manufacturing jobs. Pilkington also promotes strange theories of trade imbalances, as presented by the non-economists Oren Cass and Michael Pettis but rejected by virtually all serious researchers in the area. Their view is that a huge economic restructuring is needed because China and Germany keep running trade surpluses while the US is in perpetual trade deficit. But in reality this arrangement seems as stable as any other macroeconomic state of affairs could be. It is Pilkington’s prerogative to disagree with the consensus, but we are never told why everyone else might be wrong. Overall, there is too much sloppiness here in service of the agenda of carping about liberal societies.

And on Robert Kagan:

An alternative and less neat vision of American history shows how liberalism has often relied on illiberalism, and not just accidentally. Lincoln was a significant abuser of civil rights, including on habeas corpus. The North’s campaigns in the Civil War killed many thousands of innocent civilians, not all of them in the service of legitimate military ends. You can argue that this may have been necessary, but liberal it was not. As for FDR, he tried to pack the Supreme Court and sought a significant expansion of executive power, making his administrations a methodological precursor of Trump. He did fight the Second World War on the side of liberalism, but he did not always use liberal means (eg the firebombing of Tokyo), and indeed a full respect for the laws of warfare might not have secured victory.

Once we see American history as a union of liberal and illiberal forces, we can relax a little about the current situation. Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviours of the past, and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism. Illiberalism has been prominent in the mix most of the time, and that is both the good news and the bad.

Interesting throughout, recommended, I believe it is the Sept.1 issue.