The Liberalism of Refuge

Frustrated by intractable inequality, oppression, and corruption in liberal societies, and disillusioned by liberalism's failures, many are walking away. But it is precisely for that reason that the liberal societies remain worth admiring: they offer refuge from those very individuals they empower, placing limits on rulers and allowing an escape hatch from political life's worst abuses. Sanctuaries can be found in opposition political parties, independent institutions, reasonably autonomous local communities, powerful civil society organizations, and the market economy. There is something noble in sanctuary, in the safety and possibility it offers for constructing something new.

Autopsy and demonology — these are the two genres of writing on liberalism with the most sway in public discussion today. Autopsies propose to explain "why liberalism failed" or how it decayed into neoliberalism. Demonologies claim to show that the inequalities, oppressions, and corruptions of contemporary society are the work of a single vaguely defined yet immensely powerful force, "liberalism," haunting our era. There are, to be sure, recent writings that try to rescue or even glorify liberal thinkers or ideas, but their tone is plaintive or desperate. The moment belongs to liberalism's critics on the left and the right.

In times of liberal dominance — in the glow of 1989 — such critics could be welcomed as gadflies to startle us, to interrupt our sometimes dangerously complacent satisfaction with the fruits of success. Today, however, we run the risk of overcorrecting. Coasting on momentum produced by generations of liberal politics, we imagine that we no longer need its help. We suppose the problems liberals responded to should no longer trouble us, or at least that they no longer require liberal remedies. Frustrated by the injustices that seem to flourish in some of the spaces liberal pluralism protects, we're tempted to step back from pluralism. Indignant that the leaders we favor do not have more power to defeat our opponents, we become skeptical about constitutional checks on their authority. Liberal institutions and norms come to feel like constraints on our ability to pursue the good rather than safeguards against the bad. In this context, many of us have lost track of what was the motivating spirit for liberal societies, and more importantly perhaps, we've almost forgotten what in those societies can be admirable and adventurous. What I want to do here is offer one way of trying to understand that motivating spirit, and remember why we might admire it.

I mean to suggest that liberal societies are those that offer refuge from the very people they empower. The reach of this formulation will become evident once we allow ourselves to use "refuge" in both a literal and metaphorical sense, so that institutions and practices may be said to offer refuge from a powerful person, as much as may a fortress.

Historically, a monarchy empowered a king or queen, or a family. It was only a liberal monarchy if it also included a parliament or a class of nobles who had real power of some kind, so that a citizen who fell out of the king's good graces could take refuge under the protection of this or that aristocrat or constituency. The eighteenth-century French writer Montesquieu emphasized this idea when distinguishing monarchy from despotism.1

Analogously, a democracy empowers the people or — more precisely — the particular people who can persuasively claim to speak for the majority. Only a liberal democracy provides refuge from the very leaders and their partisans. There may be no resisting the majority in the long term, as Alexis de Tocqueville seems to have thought, but in a liberal democracy one should be able to find a host of power centers outside the centralized state authority that will offer significant shelter from whatever version of popular sovereignty is reigning at any particular moment.

A religion empowers people too — priests, most obviously. A religion is liberal if it also offers refuge from its leaders. Clergy may still serve, for most religious people, as authoritative guides through life's key moments. But abuses by priests are not unknown. A liberal religion would make room for other sects, denominations, or congregations; or for direct access to the sacred books themselves; or, finally, for the dictates of one's own conscience — all of which might be seen metaphorically as places of refuge from the very people a religion gives power to.

Since liberal societies do within them contain other types of refuge, they shouldn't create many refugees heading elsewhere. The United States does not tend to generate large refugee flows, but those it has sometimes generated-as when enslaved Americans fled to Canada before the American Civil War-have provided good indices of weaknesses in its liberal credentials. Liberal societies themselves should by their nature appreciate the plight of foreign refugees and err on the side of welcoming them,