THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

THERE are many causes for the rediscovery in our time of the love of dictatorship, for the heartbreaking revival of the preference for what a sixteenth-century French thinker perplexedly called "voluntary servitude." Some of those causes are economic, but not all of them. We are witnessing also an intellectual convulsion. Not an intellectual war, exactly: one side has yet to come in its full force to the barricades. It has failed in this way before, and disaster ensued. That side is, of course, the liberal side. The rise of authoritarianism is nothing other than the decline of liberalism. In an alarming number of countries and cultures, some of which have experienced a liberal order and some of which have not, the liberal idea is being furiously delegitimated. And not only delegitimated, but also slandered. The description of liberalism as an evil may be the greatest lie of our exceedingly mendacious time.

I leave it for historians to document the plenitude of blessings that the liberal order conferred upon those societies which wisely joined it over the last seven or eight decades. Never has more progress been accompanied by less injustice than in the liberal era. Since I believe that this momentous progress has been owed as much to beliefs as to policies, and that political climates are prepared by intellectual climates, I am more concerned about the philosophical origins of our political circumstances. Intellectually, I am a warmonger. I confess to a lust for battle. It cannot be otherwise, since my enemies, the enemies of liberalism, also have a lust for battle, and they have launched their attack. It comes at us from all sides.  In some ways (but not as many as certain commentators think) we have been re-enacting the 1930s, and one of them is in the consensus among the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists, that the liberals are the villains. 

The ultras can live happily with each other; they need each other; they thrive off each other. They share the revolutionary mentality, the excitement of apocalyptic feeling. Together, therefore, they must band together to destroy the anti-apocalyptics in their midst--the ones who worry about the means as well as the ends; who would rather repair institutions than destroy them; who remember the long history of venalities and atrocities committed in the pursuit of justice; who abhor mobs; who insist that authenticity must answer to morality; who despise simple explanations and worldviews that can be captured in slogans and flags; who dread redemptions and redeemers. Now all those convictions, all the great principles that constitute the liberal tradition, every single one of them, must be defended. After everything that liberalism endured and survived, after the unimaginably savage assaults of fascism and communism, we must steadfastly fight for it all over again, and we must begin again at the beginning. Many of our current opponents are the heirs of liberalism's older enemies, and we, too, must keep the faith of our fathers--not because it is ours, but because ethically and philosophically we can justify it. 

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