The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities

Mearsheimer

The liberal story begins with atomized individuals in the state of nature, where they are said to have a common set of traits. In this “state of perfect freedom” they are all endowed with a set of inalienable rights and they are all equals. John Locke, one of liberalism’s founders, describes the state of nature as “a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.”

This emphasis on individualism represented a radical break with the writings of premodern political philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Machiavelli, and Plato, all of whom assumed that humans are naturally political or social beings. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it, 'Our ancestors had no word for individualism, a word we have coined for our own use because, in their time, there was no individual who did not belong to a group or who could consider himself to be entirely alone.' Nor did these 'ancestors' think that all individuals should be seen as equals. They thought that some men are born with superior talents and thus deserve to rule the less capable.

Political liberalism’s second foundational assumption concerns our ability to reason. There is no question humans possess impressive critical faculties. But as we have seen, their ability to reason has only limited use for determining what constitutes the good life... When individuals differ over first principles, they sometimes end up hating and trying to harm each other...

Political liberals have a three-pronged strategy for dealing with the possibility of deadly conflict. First, they emphasize that everyone’s set of inalienable rights includes the right to life, which means not only the right to survive but also the freedom to live the good life as one sees fit. People have the right to choose whatever lifestyle they want, as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. This specifically includes 'freedom of conscience,' the right to live according to one’s religious beliefs. Rights are designed to maximize the amount of freedom individuals have in their daily lives. The most famous sentence in America’s Declaration of Independence succinctly captures this first prong of political liberalism: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'..

[But some] people feel so passionately about particular aspects of the good life that they cannot abide disagreement. They find it impossible to believe that other worldviews can be held in good faith—the people who hold those views, they imagine, must be deliberately turning away from the truth and are perhaps evil. This intolerant mind-set makes them a threat not just to their antagonists but to liberal society itself. The fact that not everyone will be committed to value pluralism brings us to the third prong in the liberal strategy: a strong state that sits above society and maintains order. The state is well suited for this task because, as Max Weber famously said, it holds a 'monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.'

The state, to maintain order, assumes three principal roles. Most importantly, it acts as a night watchman that protects individual rights and prevents mortal combat between people or factions with conflicting views. Liberalism, to borrow Thomas Carlyle’s phrase, is 'anarchy plus a constable.' The state also writes the rules that define acceptable and unacceptable conduct while going to great lengths not to trample on individual rights. These rules allow individuals or groups to interact in civil ways as each pursues its own version of the good life. Finally, the state acts as an arbiter when serious disputes arise, to ensure that conflicts do not lead to violence. The state, in other words, functions as rule maker, umpire, and night watchman.

The liberal state obviously performs more functions than those aimed at keeping domestic order. Progressive liberals want the state to promote equal opportunity for its citizens and engage in other forms of social engineering as well. Modus vivendi liberals would surely object, but even they mostly agree that the state has to manage its economy and conduct foreign policy. A host of other matters, such as education, social security, housing, and labor relations, also require the attention of even a laissez-faire government, if it hopes to avoid economic depression, chaos, and unrest. In short, modern liberalism cannot work without a strong state.

Still, political liberals of all persuasions have mixed views about the state’s role. Although they know the state is essential for preserving orderand allowing civil society to flourish, they also recognize its powerful potential to trample on individual rights... Nevertheless, as the quintessential liberal Thomas Paine wrote, government is in the final analysis a 'necessary evil.'

Liberals thus look for ways to limit the state’s power. For example, liberal states can set up a political order built around checks and balances; or they can adopt federalism, where the central government delegates substantial power to regional authorities. Because liberal countries are invariably democracies, there is always the risk that the majority will tyrannize the minority. One way to minimize this danger is to write a clearly articulated bill of rights into the constitution...

To understand how thoroughly progressivism has triumphed, consider how liberalism relates to the major political parties in the United States today. The Democratic Party’s ruling ideology is clearly progressive liberalism, and it acts accordingly when it controls the key levers of power in Washington. If you listen to Republicans, you might think they follow the dictates of modus vivendi liberalism. That is usually true of their rhetoric, but it is not how they govern. In office, Republicans act like Democrats. For example, the annualized growth of federal spending since 1982 grew more under Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43) than Democrats (Clinton and Obama). It grew by 8.7 percent under Reagan between 1982 and 1985, but only 1.4 percent under Obama between 2010 and 2013.

Reagan also signed into law in 1986 the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which prohibits hospitals from turning away people who come to an emergency room for treatment. It does not matter whether those individuals are American citizens, what their legal status is, or whether they can afford the treatment. In effect, this law says that health care is a human right. In fact, Reagan said as early as 1961 that “any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide itfor himself should have it provided for him”... Republican presidents oversaw the beginnings of the Interstate Highway System, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans, in short, are deeply committed to the interventionist state and the extensive social engineering that comes with it...

Three major forces drove progressive liberalism’s ascendancy. The first was the Industrial Revolution, which started in England in the eighteenth century and continues even today to generate enormous economic and social change. Among other things, it led to the rise of large-scale enterprises—manufacturing companies, financial firms, trade associations, research universities, and labor unions, to name a few—that profoundly affected the lives of millions of people.

[The previous paragraphs focused on] describing and analyzing political liberalism as it applies to politics at home. [But] what happens when a powerful state adopts a liberal foreign policy? In other words, what happens when a country that is deeply committed to individual rights and doing social engineering to promote those rights employs that template in the wider world?

That formidable state will end up embracing liberal hegemony, a highly interventionist foreign policy that involves fighting wars and doing significant social engineering in countries throughout the world. Its main aim will be to spread liberal democracy, toppling authoritarian regimes in the process, with the ultimate goal of creating a world populated solely by liberal democracies. In effect, a state pursuing liberal hegemony aims to remake the international system in its own image. It will also work to foster an open world economy and build international institutions to deal with both economic and security issues...

The prominence that liberalism accords to the notion of inalienable or universal rights means that a foreign policy based on liberal principles requires careful monitoring of other countries’ human rights performance. When the rights of foreigners are threatened, a powerful state pursuing liberal hegemony will likely feel compelled to intervene to protect the rights of those individuals. That state is apt to conclude that the best way to ameliorate, even eliminate, the threat to individual rights is to make sure that as many people as possible live in a liberal democracy, where respect for individual rights is of great importance. This logic leads straight to an active policy of regime change aimed at toppling autocracies and replacing them with liberal democracies.

Liberalism has to have a night watchman if it is to work: it demands a hierarchic political system such as exists inside the state itself. But the international system is anarchic, not hierarchic. As long as liberal states operate in either bipolarity or multipolarity, they have no choice but to act toward each other according to realist logic.