Needed: A Replacement for Liberalism
We need a better way to govern justly the governance of society.
Liberal nations are suffering a crisis of governance. Its conceptual and practical limitations as an approach to governing the governance of society are being exposed. A new approach to justly governing governance is needed yesterday.
To the eternal credit of its contributors and its proponents, Liberalism has been the only meta-ideology even to attempt to put justice first. Other ideologists might claim that their ideology represents ‘justice’, but only Liberalism has made trying to understand what justice is and shaping governance accordingly its defining aim.
Has Liberalism fallen short? Oh, yes: sadly, it has. Practically, it has failed to solve the problems of unemployment and poverty that have plagued civilization from its beginning. Moreover, the assault on the natural environment of this planet, this blue pearl of Creation, is in fact a new civilizational problem that the approach to the economy within Liberalism has brought upon the world. More abstractly but perhaps most importantly, despite its claims to universality Liberal culture has perpetuated within itself the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that has perverted relations among people for as long as we humans have trod upon this Earth.
Yet, Liberalism has also been the source of the most progress in human relations ever made.
Structurally, the democratic political process in Liberal nations has been fully realized. Never before in human history has it been the case that all citizens have been allowed to participate in that process and any person, without regard for wealth, or place of origin/geographical heritage, or ‘race’ (color of skin), or gender, or creed could be a citizen. Democracy makes possible the maximum liberty for all under the rule of law. Without it the rule of law cannot exist. Without that, liberty for all can never exist.
The economy has also been a locus of real social progress. Bondage slavery and serfdom were abolished. Enough said.
For sure, economic exploitation still exists. That is the reason I began the intellectual quest that led to ‘real justice’ (my own attempt at a different approach to just governance): to see if the economy that already existed within Liberalism could be made more just. That turned out to require a whole new and different approach to justice itself. It does happen that the existing economic system — its fundamental institutional structure — is suitable for achieving a more just or even a fully just economy according to real justice.
(Justice is not an either/or proposition in real justice. There is a perfectly clear distinction between just and unjust conduct, but in it there is an unlimited range of justice in human relations: in contrast to basing justice on liberty or equality, there is no limit on how just those relations can be. Moreover, the sufficient and minimum conditions of justice in it are the same for all of the forms that human relations can take — even relations among nations!)
The most fundamental problem in Liberalism is the lack of an explicit ethic of justice. In that meta-ideology, which has spawned the narrower political ideologies of libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, and democratic socialism (as opposed to Marxism), equality and liberty are seen to be the ‘twin pillars of justice’ for a just society. Those political ideologies tend to emphasize one or the other, but to be within the Liberal tradition both must be recognized as being necessary for a just society. Yet, those two ‘pillars’ have been the very source of ‘us vs. them’ within Liberalism, serving as rallying points for supporters of very different approaches to governing governance.
The ultimate problem is that neither of those is an ethic, a rule for governing relations among people. An appeal to ‘equal rights’, with liberty second only to life itself, based on that conceptual construct has proven to be unwieldy, unstable, and ultimately lacking in anything approaching equal justice for all. ‘Rights’ have been yet another ‘issue’ over which libertarians and equalitarians can divide.
Liberty is the opposite of an ethic. Libertarians insist that ‘liberty’ is distinguished from ‘freedom’ (much less licentiousness) by the existence of some vaguely referenced internal governor, by which it is recognized that any person’s liberty ‘ends at the person and property’ of any other person. Whatever the source of that limitation might be, it is a constraint on liberty, not liberty itself. Since even for a libertarian it is that constraint on liberty that is the essence of justice, i.e., how people should act with respect to one another, the source of that constraint is the true source justice in libertarian Liberalism.
Equality is not in itself a rule of any kind. It is a belief about human being, one that can be strictly secular or sacrally located. Either way, it is a belief that we are all ‘morally equal’.
Actually, a belief in human equality does yield an ethic: mutual respect. Even so, even social-democrat Liberals have not as a group formally recognized mutual respect as the ethic of justice, much less how that ethic can be explicitly applied to the governance of society.
The fissures within Liberalism are growing into unbridgeable chasms. That is threatening to make Liberal nations ungovernable. Being ungovernable is the usual first step towards ‘regime change’ that comes from within. In general, those nations that have clearly emphasized equality are suffering less stress than the others, but within Liberalism that divide is a crack in the facade. It is an opening into which opportunistic ‘populists’ are driving political wedges. Their goal is to take advantage of the failing of Liberalism to pry society apart politically and to create the social conditions that will allow for replacing democracy, with the maximum liberty for all under the rule of law, with tyranny of one kind or another. Real justice provides people with no appetite for tyranny a fully formed alternative to that fate.
Any proffered approach to governing governance will have a conceptual aspect and a practical aspect.
Conceptually, the most fundamental aspects of human being in terms of our relations with one another are our given existence as separate and independent beings with respect to one another who are at the same time social beings who live together in groups. In Liberalism those aspects of our being are in opposition: a self-centered individualism vs. any more societally-oriented approach to governance. Real justice resolves that most elemental duality in human existence without arbitrarily privileging either over the other. There, there is no ‘us vs. them’. There is only humanity.
As a practical matter, a nation governed by real justice would have, among other good things, the maximum liberty that coexisting people can share simultaneously. It would have a democratic political process. It would have an economy that leaves to markets as much as possible, subject to the obligations and protections of the ethic of real justice, the facilitation of economic activity: producing/acquiring goods/services. It would also have a guaranteed minimum income that would be sufficient for a materially sufficient life and for which any adult citizen could become eligible: a ‘democratically distributed’ income.
That could presumably be accomplished using taxation, but this author has developed an alternative monetary paradigm.
It could be implemented using the existing economic system, and would produce such an income without redistributing anything. Unemployment and poverty would be systemically eliminated — without imposing any cost on employers. This paradigm would also systemically increase sustainability — without requiring anyone to act any differently than anybody does today (though, to be sure, for the sake of the present and any future generations most of us really do need act very differently than we are doing — I know I drive way too many unnecessary miles). It could even be used to eliminate using taxes for funding government — all government, from local to central, at the current rate of per capita total government spending. To be clear, any other goals related to the economy and its outcomes for society that any people might deem to be desirable could still be pursued in the political process.
That might look to many people like a well-governed Liberal nation. Yet, real justice is clearly outside the Liberal tradition. It recognizes neither equality nor liberty nor both somehow mashed together as the starting point for achieving a just society. Rather, it follows from an observation within material existence (from Warren J. Samuels): human beings have no choice but to effect choices, i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition. That means that both the determinant of the ethic of real justice (that observation) and its referents (such actions that involve any other human beings in any way) are contained within the ‘real world’: material existence. That is why it can be called ‘real justice’.
______________
more on governance governed by real justice (but without calling it that): “Alright, Already” (here in Medium, but not behind the paywall)