Conservative Arguments for an Un-modern America

“Before we can begin to analyze any specific form of liberalism,” the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar wrote in 1989, “we must surely state as clearly as possible what the word means.” This is no easy task, for liberalism boasts a long list of dogged impersonators. Its detractors equate it with ideas ranging from the technocratic policies of the contemporary Democratic Party to the chilly rationalism of the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. Shklar cautioned that its opponents were also wont to identify it with “modernity,” by which they meant a miasmic mist of “technology, industrialization, skepticism, loss of religious orthodoxy, disenchantment, nihilism, and atomistic individualism.” Liberalism is the European Union, but it is also Ruth Bader Ginsburg votive candles. It is a political platform, but in the eyes of its critics, it is more essentially a social atmosphere.