Where is liberalism practiced

But in a diverse liberal polity like the United States, disagreement runs deep, and a segment of the population will simply regard the regime as illegitimate. In Liberalism in Practice , Olivia Newman argues that if citizens were to approach politics in the spirit of public reason, couching arguments in terms that others can reasonably accept, institutional and political legitimacy would be enhanced.

Liberal theory has relied on the assumption of a unified self, that individuals are unified around a single set of goals, beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes. Drawing on empirical findings in psychology, Newman argues instead that we are complex creatures whose dispositions and traits develop differently in different domains; we hold different moral commitments in different parts of our lives.

She argues further that this domain differentiation allows us to be good liberal citizens in the public domain while remaining true to private commitments and beliefs in other domains. Newman proposes that educational and institutional arrangements can use this capacity for differentiation to teach public reason without overwhelming conflicting commitments.

The psychology and pedagogy of public reason proposed by Newman move beyond John Rawls's strictly political liberalism toward what Newman terms practical liberalism. Although we cannot resolve every philosophical problem bedeviling theories of liberalism, we can enjoy the myriad benefits of liberalism in practice.

In Liberalism in Practice , Olivia Newman advances a theory of the self that opens whole new vistas for political theory, offers welcome reasons to be optimistic about liberalism, and suggests important implications for education. Americans say "unalienable" and mean something like "inviolable, at least for innocent people. Only a small if occasionally illustrious group of Americans has ever thought that "no law respecting an establishment of religion" required all our governments to be fully agnostic or religiously neutral.

Practically no American has ever thought to expurgate from our marriage laws any moral claims beyond the bare requirements of social order or of comfortable self-preservation; our family law has always been shaped by other considerations alien to liberal theory, from Protestant moral doctrine to the more pagan desire for public honors.

And the Declaration of Independence itself is a fabric woven out of many strands. Can anyone seriously think that a single one of its signatories viewed politics as a mere vehicle for comfortable self-preservation? Like barbarian raiders coming upon a temple, Americans have disassembled the imposing edifices of Lockean theory and repurposed their marble to rougher and readier uses. The remnants of the old structure, in their new context, have come to signify something far removed from the lofty aims of the original builders.

Even if the new building may lack some of the beauty of the original, those of us disinclined to worship at the old altar should be glad of the exchange. In short, to the extent that Americans have been exposed to snippets of liberal theory, most of them have grossly misunderstood it, and have certainly not guided their lives or their politics by its dictates. This poses a terrible difficulty for anyone attempting to trace recent failings of American practice to essential defects of liberal theory.

Americans are known throughout the world as a practical-minded people. As Tocqueville noted, our practical bent has generally been good for our political stability and bad for our intellectual life. For better and for worse, we have enjoyed a fairly high degree of national immunity to ideologies.

It is a blueprint for human society deduced from philosophic principles. It offers direct political guidance meant to apply universally, to human communities everywhere at least once they have reached a certain stage of historical progress. And it condemns as illegitimate all political arrangements that fall short of its strictures. To be sure, the temptation toward ideology has always been present within the American educated class.

But, God bless them, they have never been very good at it. It is hard to say whether Locke would have laughed or cried to watch American thinker-practitioners flailing through the Pacificus-Helvidius debates, or the antebellum controversies over the nature of our social contract s , or our tortuous postwar Establishment Clause jurisprudence. American practicality will always be the bane of intellectuals who wish to turn American political thought into ideology. Today, many American intellectuals go so far as to prefer liberal ideology whether of the left or the right over the real historical experience of liberal nations, including our own.

This error has provoked much overreaction by today's critics of liberalism. But the damage it has done to our political discourse goes far deeper than that. The fact of the matter is that liberal ideology is false. It is false because all ideologies are false. Aristotle tried to warn us that politics is not subject to universal formulas and deductive syllogisms in the manner of mathematics or physics. After the experience of the 20th century, the burden of proof should really be on anyone who wants to assert otherwise.

Ideas, of course, have consequences. But politics is always so full of bad ideas that it is hard to predict which ones will have what consequences. A bad theory of politics, by definition, does not accurately describe politics. Its worst consequence is that it impedes citizens' political judgment by blurring their vision of reality.

Whether that blurred vision then produces any political consequences will depend on chance circumstances. Divine-right ideology had terrible consequences under tyrants. It also staved off some unnecessary bloodbaths whenever a mediocre king succeeded his mediocre father. Marxism had unspeakable consequences because Lenin decided to selectively adopt elements of it. Had Lenin held out for the worldwide revolution predicted by Marxist ideology, Marx's bad ideas might have been virtually consequence-free.

Our would-be critics of liberal theory are giving it more credit than it deserves. It makes no sense to attribute bad political outcomes to the practical application of a false theory.

A theory that contradicts reality does not have practical applications. If you try to follow it in one respect, you will inevitably contradict it in some other respect. Perhaps you will lead a proletarian revolution against bourgeois oppressions only to find yourself running the most cruelly oppressive oligarchy in recorded history. Perhaps you will try to export the Islamic Revolution to your Shi'ite-majority neighbor only to find yourself relying on secret arms sales from the Great Satan via the Zionist Entity.

Or perhaps you will make great strides toward dismantling the American religious establishment only to find yourself making highly illiberal demands for coerced speech by bakers and florists. None of these represents a more "consistent" version of a bad theory in practice. If it is a bad theory, it has no consistent version in practice. Whatever problems face our liberal politics today, they do not call for any new "post-liberal" political theory.

We do not need one more ideology. Those who wish to replace liberalism with any other "-ism" are still, in at least one respect, under the sway of the liberal theory they claim to have rejected. The alternative to liberal theory is not a "theory" at all, in the sense in which we usually use the term. The alternative to liberal theory is statesmanship, pure and simple.

And since modern technology has left us with only nightmarish alternatives to liberal politics, any statesmanship worth practicing today will necessarily be liberal statesmanship.

Statesmanship poses enormous intellectual challenges. But they are not the challenges of working out or applying any "theory" of politics. Statesmanship has been practiced fairly well by thousands of men and women unacquainted with liberal theory or any other theory. Its goals are commonsensical. Its basic principles are familiar to anyone who has experienced being a citizen in a free republic. Its greatest examples are well known to all of us. Today, though, common sense is obscured by countless ideologies that cut us off from our own natural experiences as citizens.

An education for statesmanship therefore requires the study of texts that train us to look at politics without ideological filters. This education begins from a deep historical and literary grounding in human, and especially American, experience. Most of our primary and secondary schools have all but given up the attempt to offer any such grounding.

But in one of the remarkable signs of hope for American liberalism, a growing number of charter and religious schools throughout the country are rediscovering this indispensable civic mission. Eventually, our future statesmen must also be formed by studying the many non-ideological texts within the tradition of American political thought, of which the Federalist Papers remain the unsurpassed exemplar. And they must be formed by reading, without help from any ideological narrative or cheat sheet, the texts on politics that formed the thinking of American statesmen from James Madison to George Kennan and beyond.

That was, after all, the education that allowed our founders to read Locke with such marvelous selectivity. The University of Dallas, where I teach, is one of a handful of schools where these texts remain at the heart of the politics curriculum.

The classical educators of statesmen show us the real alternative to liberal ideology. They teach us how to conduct a non-ideological appraisal of our own liberal politics with a view to preserving and improving it. With Xenophon we ask, who constitutes the American ruling class, and how are they educated? With Thucydides we ask, where are the seeds of civil strife within our community, and how well are we keeping those seeds dormant?

With Aristotle we ask, what views does our community pass on to its children? What moral and mental habits does it instill in them? With Plato we ask, how well does our community foster the things that make human life worth living, including love, friendship, and family? How well does it make space for things higher than politics, including knowledge, divine worship, and human excellence in general?

With Cicero we ask, in light of our answers to questions like these, how can we make the best of the admirable but imperfect regime we find ourselves in? By what concrete policies can we encourage its strengths while discreetly shoring up its weaknesses? Liberal theory, as I have been using the term, dismisses these sorts of questions as irrelevant to the practical tasks of statesmanship.

That has not stopped some modern political philosophers from raising similar questions about the liberal regimes they admired. If one should insist on calling Montesquieu, Burke, or Tocqueville a "liberal theorist," one would obviously be speaking about a very different kind of "theory" than what we usually mean by the term today. These men did not all ask the same questions, nor reach the same conclusions, as their ancient counterparts.

But they did keep alive, by their own lights, the centuries-old tradition of non-ideological political thought. That tradition needs to be carried on and applied in our contemporary situation just as these great liberal thinkers carried it on and applied it in theirs.

This is the only "theoretical" response demanded by the bankruptcy of liberal ideology. The tradition of non-ideological political thought is patriotic. From Athens to Rome to Florence to England to France to America, political philosophers have loved their city or nation for among other things being free and strong enough to permit well-intentioned internal critique.

They have known that open debate about the principles of politics is a rare gift that demands our gratitude. They have acknowledged this debt by respecting and supporting the political preconditions of their own intellectual activity. Among grown-ups, at least, any debate today about "liberalism" must start from the premise of loyalty to the regime that permits this debate. Acknowledging that we are all Americans and therefore in some sense liberals is an act of intellectual honesty that should open up, not foreclose, the most interesting debates about where our regime is and ought to be headed.

For it is difficult to have a serious debate with someone who appears to want to saw off the limb he is sitting on. Anyone can see a problem when Noam Chomsky critiques the supposed illiberalism of America and Israel on the basis of reports from free American and Israeli media. Conservative critics of liberal theory, if they wish to be taken seriously, will need to avoid the same error.

Today, instead, well-fed American authors breezily eulogize illiberal strongmen, while the same strongmen offer very different living arrangements to any of their own subjects who would speak of America with equal warmth. And young Catholic monarchists express their nostalgia for an imaginary 13th century in character tweets, which are surely the most American form of intellectual discourse ever invented.

If all knowledge begins with self-knowledge, let us recognize that our debates about liberalism are very American debates about a very American version of liberalism. At that point the more interesting conversations can begin.

The Fair Elections Act passed in guarantees a free and fair electoral process. Just like Canada, Australia has included the civil and human rights in its constitution. Voting is compulsory, and the constitution guarantees a free and fair electoral process. In both economies, the taxation level is low. Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Finland tied for the fifth place in the ranking.

The four countries are all ranked among the 12 best countries to live in terms of political stability, economic prosperity and the quality of life. Norway is a well-established democracy with free and fair elections. The government alternate between the Conservative and Labor Parties.

Sweden, on the other hand, is a parliamentary monarchy with a robust multi-party system. The rule of law prevails, and the constitution guarantees the civil and liberty rights of the citizenry. A parliamentary system governs Finland with robust multipartyism. Freedom of speech, association, and religion are guaranteed. The minority in the society are also protected. The Netherlands and Ireland tie in the ninth place and complete the list of the ten most liberal countries in the world.

The parliamentary democracy that governs the Netherlands has a strong record.