The Brooklyn Rail

“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
–Frederick Douglass

“Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.”
–John Ruskin

“If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.”
–Toni Morrison

How can we forget the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, Brexit, the rise of populism in the West, while in the East China’s fierce ambition altered the global balance of power? As we now come to acknowledge that we had taken liberal democracy for granted in the last few decades, we have to remind ourselves how its miracle is also its fragility. In the ideal proposition, liberal democracy, which includes the modern state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability need to be vigorously balanced. But we also know that it’s nearly impossible to achieve formal, impersonal equilibrium while disregarding everything that pertains to the personal. In other words, we have a natural inclination to favor those within our social sphere of influence and consider it unnatural to welcome any outsider to the same milieu.

If our first modern state system began with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and by the mid-twentieth century had become global, its success was based on procedural issues: the formal and impersonal over specifically personalized content; although there had been numerous failures that favored the latter. As we’re now ready for the second term of Donald J. Trump, which will probably be the most challenging four years we’ve yet experienced in our liberal democracy, we must be mindful of the most important shift in politics, namely identity politics, that has increasingly become more pronounced than ever before. In the last two decades we have seen how political parties that propound identity attract more voters than ones that follow older left vs. right economic and social policies. At the same time, globalization has helped in creating various opportunities for employment, though it has created greater economic inequality, especially in the Western world.

Sir Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” seems especially relevant now, as it introduced two categories of freedom: Negative freedom, on one hand, is the freedom from interference, coercion, or restraint, although it’s determined by the number of options available to us. On the other hand, positive freedom is the freedom to do something, or to act upon our will. It’s about the ability to take control of our lives and realize our fundamental purposes. Both of these ideas lead us again to thinking of Alexis de Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority versus the tyranny of the minority. While the former refers to the potential danger in a democracy where the majority population can use their power to oppress or suppress the rights and opinions of minority groups, essentially creating a form of tyranny against those who hold differing views, the latter represents the possibility of minority groups having too much influence over the majority. We always have to ask ourselves what it means to be freed from one thing, becoming free to do something else. For example, what cost did Americans have to pay to gain their freedom from the British Empire? How did the Founding Fathers create the Constitution? How were the cultures of the arts and humanities created while this new country was being made in its early formation?

When we consider that both Thomas Paine (the father of the left) and Edmund Burke (the father of the right) each based their respective political leanings on ideas related to the French Revolution, (both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers each contained eighty-five articles) we should think of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (written during Jacksonian America) in the same breath. We should also think about how these various forces led to Transcendentalism, founded by a group of philosophers, writers, and poets that included Frederic Henry Hedge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, among others, whose writings were disseminated through the Dial magazine. Then came the Civil War and the miraculous arrival of Walt Whitman that prompted the beginning of American Pragmatism, which persisted with great fertility through the works of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, which led to the progressive education that was so effectively deployed in the midst of the Great Depression, which was sustained in various ways, with tremendous difficulties, throughout the decades of the 1960s and 1970s.