Michael Sean Winters on celebrating liberalism National Catholic Reporter
Near the top of my list of things for which to be grateful each year is the fact that I was born in a country with a liberal political regime. Sadly, these days, liberalism is besieged. Whether it is the victory of libertarian-populist Javier Milei in Argentina's presidential race, or President Joe Biden's sagging poll numbers vs. Donald Trump, or the outbreak of moral idiocy on college campuses in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, liberalism seems to be hanging on by a thread.
This time next year, will we be celebrating liberalism's resilience or mourning its demise?
If you want to avoid depression this week, I recommend two quick reads. First, Biden's op-ed in The Washington Post explaining his administration's policy in Ukraine and the Mideast. Normally, I would pick such a column apart and highlight the flaws, and flaws there are. "The United States is the essential nation," Biden writes and even while it is true in some sense, the claim resonates with the kind of haughtiness that gets us into trouble.
Mindful of the need to cultivate gratitude, let's look past the problems in Biden's piece to the policies he is defending. In Russian President Vladamir Putin and in Hamas, we recognize hateful enemies of liberalism, and America has a role in their defeat. "We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future," Biden writes.
In both instances, the president draws on history. Biden notes that "when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out."
The president's argument about the Mideast rests on two equally vital commitments. First, he states, "We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas." This is the very essence of being an ally.
The second point is less widely recognized. He states, "The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas." The nihilism of Hamas results not only in ghoulish celebrations of killing, raping and maiming civilians and even Israeli children, it reduces Palestinian children to props in a propaganda war and human shields in an actual one.
We may not agree with everything the Biden administration says or does, but he is a bulwark against the tide of authoritarianism and populist aggression and brutishness that exists in our own country and throughout the world.
The other item that makes me hopeful is Cass Sunstein's apologia for liberalism in The New York Times, in which he lists 34 attributes of liberalism, "of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be."
You can quibble, as I do, with some of what he writes. For example, his commentary on the relationship of liberalism and religion is a little thin, and assumes that religion is a private affair.
Still, other items ring true and clear. Among my favorite sentences was this on authoritarianism: "Now, as in the 1940s, liberals admire Franklin Delano Roosevelt's words about those who call for 'a new order': 'It is not new and it is not order.' "
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