A current theme among the commentariat is that political movements like MAGA are illiberal, tapping into old ideological currents like fascism and religious totalitarianism. And, according to Yuval Noah Harari, the fictions that drive movements like these pose a unique problem for liberalism because it does not, in turn, have nourishing narratives that provide the utopian clarity of religious or ideological fables. For the communist, utopia comes from class purification. For the fascist, Xanadu arrives from ethnic and racial purity. For the religious, there is only God’s will. But for liberalism, we accept there is no perfection, only problems, checks and balances, eternal struggle, and a simmering gradualism that emerges from squabbling interests. No one is happy. No one can be happy with a narrative that is the worst of all possible systems except all the others. The reality is grinding, truth is grinding, and the vague struggle in an unrelenting system makes for a blurry tale with no focus, corrupt heroes, and complexity rather than epic arcs of resolution.

I am an optimist about the project of liberalism, nonetheless, and think we see its progress throughout the world. There are astonishing statistics like the reduction in poverty rates in the world even while supporting massive populations. These achievements came about despite the chaos arising with the end of colonialism and the structured Cold War alliances of the mid-20th Century. The stories are simple enough that they are easily forgotten, like the Green Revolution and the spread of health care. The stories are often contested, as well, like the rise of social insurance and welfare policies, where extreme corners of the liberal worldview take exception to the the costs imposed by this kind of organization.… Read the rest