Liberal Democracy Critiqued and Affirmed

In Liberalism in Dark Times, an important, impressive and well documented book, Joshua Cherniss, associate professor of government at Georgetown University, focuses on an aspect of liberal theory that tends to not get very much attention, a gap that he thoroughly and satisfactorily addresses. This is a much needed study now that the liberal democracies face the rise of autocratic governments around the world as well as the rise of internal autocratic movements. With particular insight, Cherniss dwells on the issue of the liberal temperament and the question of ruthlessness in political action. Ruthlessness, as he defines it, “rejects all scruples, doubts, hesitation, and remorse in pursuing some ultimate purpose or serving some paramount principle” (2). By contrast, liberalism, by any definition, is centrally concerned with political limits and, hence, would have to be opposed to any example of ruthless conduct that rejects limits or self-restraint. But much current liberal thought has not particularly centered on this issue. Instead, it has “focused largely on questions of justification and institutional principles” (3) perhaps because, with the crimes of fascist and Nazi regimes and the Cold War in the rear-view mirror and all the 1990s talk about the end of history and the triumph of liberalism, the problem of ruthless political conduct did not seem so salient. But the twenty-first century has put an end to much of that complacency. With the example of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, an act of political ruthlessness if there ever was one, and continuing through the threat of Islamist extremism, the resurgence of far rightist and neo-fascist movements in both America and Europe, and the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol building in January of 2021, the picture has certainly changed. Once again, liberalism, in response, is compelled to confront the question of limits and of its own ethical grounding as well. It is as if the more technical aspects of liberalism, at least for the moment, could be bracketed so that liberalism can again speak to the most fundamental, the most primal liberal concern, viz. how can political perimeters be secured so that the individual can safely exist and flourish in its own chosen course? And it is not as if the issue of political ethics hasn’t been raised before. Liberals and antiliberals clashed in the early to mid-twentieth century over political-ethical issues as well as policy matters. Each side argued for a different ethos, a term Cherniss heavily focuses upon. By ethos he means “the sensibility or manner through which a ‘creed’ or belief