From the always thoughtful and readable Jonathan Rauch, in Persuasion; some excerpts, though the whole thing is much worth reading:
Never in my lifetime have critiques of Locke, Smith, Mill, the British Enlightenment, and the American founding emanated from so many different quarters, attacked from so many directions, and sounded so scathing and confident. The liberal tradition has been undone by its amorality (says the right) and its injustice (says the left); it has, they charge, made society unfair, politics narcissistic, and truth meaningless.
Above all, they charge, liberalism has lost the confidence of the public—and of liberals….
[Yet] no viable system has emerged that can come close to replicating liberalism's capacity to produce knowledge, prosperity, freedom, and peace. In fact, both on its own terms and compared with all the historic alternatives, liberalism has delivered spectacular results. It is the greatest social technology ever invented, and well ahead of whatever comes second.
This paradoxical situation has me scratching my head, and I'm not alone. Why is liberalism so widely challenged and attacked, and so defensive and self-doubting, when it has so much to brag about? Increasingly, I have come to think we must look for an answer not just in liberalism's failures—though there certainly are some—but in liberals' failure of nerve….
I have made a couple of claims here: that liberalism delivers spectacular results; and that its would-be systemic competitors have not and cannot. Both claims require some defining and defending.
Begin, then, with a basic question: what do we (or at least I) mean by liberalism?
Not progressivism or moderate leftism, as the term came to mean in postwar U.S. discourse. Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders. It is not one idea but a family of ideas with many variants. Its central philosophy is that all persons are born free and equal. Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making. Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.
Embodying those notions are three interlinked social systems: liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices (that is, decisions about truth and knowledge). By transcending tribe, renouncing authoritarianism, substituting rules for rulers, and treating persons as interchangeable, liberalism achieves what no other social system can offer, at least on a large scale: coordination without control. In a liberal system, everyone can participate but no one is in charge.
In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts. Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived….
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