Today, it is generally believed that Western liberalism has once again faced severe internal and external threats.The internal threat comes from the failure or even failure of democratic governance. It is manifested in the rise of the black life (BLM) movement, party contention, and authoritism of the Black Destiny (BLM), the rise of the leaders of the party, and the rise of various radicals and forces.Revival and other aspects.The rise of the Chinese model is considered an external threat to liberalism.
China has not only created a miracle in the history of the world's economy in the past few decades, but also achieved unprecedented achievements in all aspects. However, the institutional system developed by China is based on its own culture and civilization.And at the international level, this system has begun to focus on other countries (especially developing countries).Although China itself is not interested, to output its own institutional system in the international community, the West still feels the pressure of institutional competition.
Since modern times, liberalism has always dominated the Western world and has been the main political idea of the West.Whether it is the West or the West, the various success since modern times belongs to the rise of liberalism.For the Western world, liberalism is the core of Western core values.Since its emergence, the western world has spent the largest amount of manpower, material resources, financial resources and intelligence to develop, maintain and diffuse liberalism, and protect liberalism from internal and external challenges and threats.
Indeed, liberalism has always created and developed in the struggle with other doctrines.Before the Cold War, there were various doctrines within the West, especially fascism. During the Cold War, communism represented by the Soviet Union was considered the biggest external threat to liberalism.
Regardless of the rhetoric of liberal defenders, in fact, the biggest threat of liberalism is always the logic of itself, whether it is theoretical logic or practical logic.Fascism is endowed by Western countries, and the background of the rise of fascism is also liberalism, that is, fascism is on the historical stage through elections and people's sovereignty.During the Cold War, the Soviet Communism had never been a real threat to liberalism; on the contrary, the West was named after this, and the internal heresy forces were suppressed and suppressed, especially in McCarthyism in the United States.
Liberal threat and crisis
So, how does the logic of liberalism be directed to the crisis of liberalism today?You can look at the following aspects.
Freedom is the core values of liberalism, and the core of freedom is personal autonomy.However, liberalism's unlimited pursuit of personal autonomy has led to the loss of freedom in the public.As the name suggests, in liberalism, a unit of society is individual.But the personal unit is not a fact, but a hypothesis.Human is a social animal. Born in society and is longer than society, no one can be completely separated from society.People are the inner part of the social group, and this is the advantage of people.In French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, human value lies in its sociality.Therefore, what Tocoweier emphasizes is not personal autonomy, but the autonomy of social autonomy and social groups.
Although Tocoweier is also a Western liberalist, its collective emphasis on people is not the mainstream of Western liberalism.The mainstream of liberalism emphasizes that individuals should be liberated from all restrictions and achieve complete freedom, including all traditional systems, norms and values.For liberalism, the only restriction that individuals need to be subject to the law of the country; except for laws, there are no other factors that can restrict individuals and should not restrict individuals.
But even the law is a huge compromise for liberals, because there is no law, individuals will become unhappy.In fact, extreme liberals are also opposed to law constraints.As a result, when personal behavior is not restricted by any social norms, the law has become the only restriction.But what does the law mean?The law represents the expansion of the country's power.This makes liberalism go to the opposite of liberalism, because the original intention of liberalism is to restrict state power.
Tocoweier emphasized that freedom exists from many social groups from family to the country (or civic society mentioned today); or, free means the autonomy of all these groups.But when all these civic society disappears, freedom and autonomy disappear.However, this disappearance is caused by the inherent logic of liberalism itself, because freedom means individuals escape from all these groups.
This is even more so in terms of market.From classical liberal economics to contemporary new liberal economics, liberalism advocates the complete freedom of the market.Complete freedom means to break the boundaries set by all people in the market.There is no border in the market.With the rise and development of capitalism, the market has broken the original localized feudal border.Globalization empowers the market to break the border of the country.When it comes to liberal economics, freedom means that the market is exempted from all interventions from the government.
Obviously, the infinite expansion of state power and market power makes individuals atomic in front of the country or in front of the market.On the surface, because there is no boundaries between individuals and the country and the market, the personal power has been expanded infinitely, but in fact, whether it is the country or the market, it has been placed in a powerful condition.
Traditionally, Western liberalism uses atomic individuals to point to an individual's survival state in an authoritative society (especially the totalitarian society).Under the authoritarian society in the West, the national reorganization of traditional social organizations, incorporating social organizations into the state's management and control mechanism, is a kind of control through political and administrative control.
But the personal atomicization of Western society is more than that of an authoritative society.Everyone is equal and equal in the market before the market, which means that there is no restrictions between individuals and countries, individuals, and markets. State and market forces can directly reach individuals.No individual can resist national power (law), nor individual can resist market power.
Today, no one can escape the country and global market, but at the same time, people feel that whether the country or the market is getting farther and farther from themselves, it is not freedom to control.The sense of alienation of the country and the market is unprecedented.This is not difficult to understand. In today's world, social protests are not directly targeted at the country or the market directly.
Even at the personal level, liberalism is full of endless contradictions and is often in a state of self -defeating.Here, the logic of liberalism is to find the latter's reorganization of social groups while leaving the existing social group.Life in a specific social group, and is restricted by this group system and standardization.As mentioned above, these systems and specifications are regarded by liberalism as unwillingness, and freedom means that individuals are liberated from these systems and specifications.But at the same time, liberalism is to advocate and promote the importance of people's identity.
Obviously, recognition is not an individual concept, but a group concept.Only when there is one person, it does not matter, and only in the comparison of different people can there be concepts of recognition.Therefore, for liberalism, the personal significance lies in liberation and reshaping itself, that is, liberating from traditional groups, and reshaping yourself as the person you want.
This situation is particularly clear in the definition of human sex.Traditionally, the difference between simple men and women is far from meeting the needs of modern society.Today, in addition to the familiar gay men and lesbians, new categories are constantly emerging, forming the so -called LGBTQ group.In fact, the logic of various virtual society groups on the network space is the same as the gender tendency group.The emergence of Internet and social media has provided people with technical conditions for reshaping globally.
People only noticed all kinds of radical groups, sprung up in the network space, but in fact, all these groups are new species of modern society.Live in realityFor people in physical society, this process of reshaping is also a process of fragmentation and even dispersion of physical society, which has produced a huge damage effect on physical society.
Non -bound form liberalism
Liberalism believes that any boundary, as small as personal orientation to the border of the country, is artificially set, and should be canceled.Obviously, liberalism is dedicated to the boundary of the boundless boundary, not acceptable to the general public.It can be said that it can be unlimited and miniaturized politics and effectively destroy liberalism.If this recognition of politics continues to destroy the existing society and leads to a human crisis, new ideology of anti -liberalism will inevitably occur.In fact, this trend has appeared in many society.
At the actual political level, liberalism is often manifested as a dispute between power between different social groups.In the early days of modernity and development, liberalism is committed to seizing power, that is, transferring power from traditional nobles to new nobles (that is, businessmen and capitalists).The power of traditional nobles is based on factors such as origin and family identity.
After the rise of merchants (and capital), they think that this power foundation is unnatural, and a more natural foundation is the wealth that people have.Liberalism demonstrates why power should be based on wealth (businessman).Therefore, early liberalism advocates the decentralization of traditional nobles and new aristocrats (businessmen).At that time, in all Western countries, capitalists or businessmen controlled parliament and shared power with the king.
After liberalism, it has become an effective tool for new groups to fight for political power.In other words, any social group can use liberalism as an effective ideological tool to fight for political power.Modern industrialization has created a capitalist group, and the capitalist group has bred a working class group.After the rise of the working class, it also followed the pace of the former businessmen and capitalists, and used liberalism to fight for power and rights for themselves.The ideological foundation of the socialist movement was also liberalism, but at that time, it was regarded as radical liberalism at the time.In the 1960s, the Western Student Movement and the Black People's Rights Movement in the 1970s were also liberalism.
In fact, from the West to Non -West today, almost all social fighting movements are the banner of liberalism.Even the populism that liberalism hates is the product of liberalism.No society becomes equal as liberalism, and society will always be hierarchical, and there will always be ruler and ruler.Trump is regarded as a populist politician, but he is also advocating to repay the people. Power should not be in the hands of the elite figures from the society, but should let the people truly grasp power.
People can imagine that Trump regards himself as a real liberal.But anyway, the so -called populist politicians are politicians who have received and supported the underlying social support.These characters can also use the principle of liberalism to grasp the regime, although they are regarded as anti -liberalism.
In the final analysis, the contradiction of liberalism is to start with sexual evil theory but finally sexual theory.At first, liberalism had an extreme realist view of human nature, that is, assuming that human nature was evil, but in the end, liberalism went to infinite exaggeration to human virtue, that is, human nature is good.This is particularly manifested in the operation of the democratic system.
Since Montesquien, almost all modern liberals believe that democracy is a system that has very high requirements for citizens. No matter what concepts they use, whether they are political virtues or civic products, they emphasize to people to people.Requirements.They realized that although democracy is inevitable, pure democracy will destroy or even destroy the principles of liberalism. Therefore, early democracy they designed are actually anti -democracy in many ways, because they have attached many conditions to democracy. In factIt is very limited democracy.
Contemporary democratic theorists are also emphasizing the importance of civic morality in democratic operation.But reality is very cruel.Driven by liberalism, the form of democracy (ie, one person, one vote) has been developed and progressive, but the content of democracy (that is, civic morality) is getting far away.For a long time in modern times, people have seen the integration of freedom and democracy, but contemporary development is the decoustal process of freedom and democracy.No wonder, more and more liberals lamented the traditional values and traditional virtues, and disappeared with the arrival of democracy they fought.
Although the resistance of the world still holds the banner of freedom and democracy and rationally fight for their rights for themselves, it is a pity that today's liberalism is not a liberalism in the past, and today's democracy is not a democracy in the past.
For liberalism, a more cruel reality is that if the democracy of one person and one vote has become an irreversible political iron law, the so -called traditional value and political virtues of liberalism are gone.And all of them are the result of liberal logic.
(The author is a professor at the East Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore)
The article only represents personal point of view
