It was an excess of discordant voices. I was really alarmed to hear the group of speakers from the International Foundation for Freedom (Fundación Internacional para la Libertad, FIL) that recently brought us together, under the worthy presidency of Mario Vargas Llosa, in Madrid. I think some of my liberal friends exaggerate. At least, my most pessimistic liberal friends.
For three years I taught a course on liberalism at the “Universidad Francisco de Vitoria” in Madrid. I began by saying that Francis Fukuyama’s proposal seemed very good to me — “the end of history” had arrived.
Finally, the Enlightenment had triumphed. It was a slow process that, in modern times, had begun with the “Declaration of Independence of the United States” in 1776 (four million inhabitants unevenly distributed in 13 English colonies, located east of the Appalachian Mountains, on the Atlantic coast), when no one was betting a penny on the survival of that young republic, the world’s first in that period of human history.
It made it to Bretton Woods in 1944, during the presidency of F.D. Roosevelt in World War II. It was already the first nation on earth just before the “Cold War” began. It remained so after the implosion of the USSR in 1991-1992, when there was a kind of de facto recognition that the USA was the most developed nation in the world.
The American model
The “liberal democracy” had asserted itself on the planet. The American formula, which the USA developed by “trial and error”, without intending to, described by Douglass North in his magnificent essay on “open access societies”, became the American “model” followed, to a greater or lesser extent, by all the successful countries on earth.
That model was made up of two elements, one political and the other economic. The political formula was the classic one described in “democratic liberalism”: freedoms, multiparty system, free elections, separation of powers, and supremacy of civil society. In the economic field, it was what has been called “capitalism”: subjection to markets and free price fixing, which allowed the incessant appearance of new economic agents and the unstoppable competition that made some people “winners” and others, “losers”.
But then the thesis of the brilliant American essayist Fukuyama and the epigones who repeated his findings turned out to be inaccurate. What was reborn was nationalism and the different expressions of anti-internationalism, such as former President Trump’s attacks on NATO and “globalism,” that is, the elements that had been created to induce good government in accordance with what the recipes of the New Enlightenment indicated.
The identitarian state
There is an episode of “Law and Order” that aptly defines the current polarization observed in the United States. According to the writers, women are not usually employed as pilots of expensive planes because it is a club of “white men” who monopolize the activities of companies. They (the fictional characters) have built a narrative which explains that women “are too emotional to have thousands of defenseless people on their hands, especially since women are periodically subject to huge hormonal changes.”
At the end of the program, as if the writers wanted to give the other side of the coin, a blonde woman appears on camera, on a university campus, explaining and denying identitarian politics as the greatest challenge that society faces. This happens in front of a statue of Jefferson, accused of being “racist” because he had a black slave, Sally Hemings, with whom he had several children he did not even recognize. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the US and author of the Declaration of Independence, did not emancipate his wife. She gave him six children, but only four reached adulthood.
The episode ends with a confrontation between the two factions, the identitarian faction, in which people of black and mixed race predominate, and the group that asks for understanding for people who in the past had assumed a “liberal” position without really being liberal, or not totally liberal, as was the case with Jefferson. The blonde woman who asked for understanding in these cases was left unconscious by the faction of the “identitarians” who beat her in that episode.
The “identitarians” are many of the blacks, immigrants, homosexuals, lesbians, trans people, and, among others, the white “liberals,” who present themselves massively and transversally as the new democrats but presented by their opponents as “Bolsheviks” or “radical left,” to which they defend themselves by accusing their opponents as “fachas” or “right-wing fascists.”
The Democratic Party is not really the “radical left,” although the tiny groups that could be designated in that way hide under its umbrella. In the same way, much of the Republican Party is not made up of “right-wing fascists.” Those are ways of simplifying and assuming highly convenient electoral positions.
However, the fact that there are divisions in societies does not grant the right to violence. Divisions always exist in societies. It is the demonstration that they are alive and vibrant. But the confrontation must always be peaceful and subject to the law. That is why I said that the bitterness of some of my colleagues from the FIL was not justified. Fukuyama and his epigones (including myself) were perhaps wrong in saying that it was “the end of history.” There are always reasons to oppose that resounding statement. Liberals believe in rectification. [©FIRMAS PRESS]
*@CarlosAMontaner. CAM’s latest book is Sin ir más lejos (Memories). Published by Debate, a label of Penguin-Random House, the book is available through Amazon Books.
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