Liberals couldn’t have chosen something better to defend
We have been building institutions to protect our freedoms and rights for decades if not centuries. These institutions are the inner citadels of our liberal democracies. The widespread feeling that they are no longer fit for purpose is one the reasons why speak of the “end of the liberal order”. We maintain and defend these citadels to keep domestic power-seekers like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán from wielding absolute power. Some of these institutions were founded to promote not just democracy and the rule of law but collective prosperity, which is also necessary to safeguard the liberal order, or what remains of it. The premise is that there’s no such thing as a poor man’s liberalism. For democracy to thrive, there must be a minimum standard of living. People must have food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Liberal rights have expanded in previous decades, but the basic rights that even schoolkids know about are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that appear in the American Declaration of Independence. A scholar described this early revolution in rights as an “expanding blaze of freedom”. For the republicans and idealists of the Americas, the right to liberty meant the freedom from meddlesome kings and imperial bureaucracies. This was true in Colombia, Mexico, Haiti and the United States, and soon after in Central America, the new promised lands of freedom.
Another right that liberal institutions seek to protect is the right to life, which is liberalism’s most basic right. The right to life is a fundamental right and the cornerstone of all the liberal rights that followed. (Just to be clear, I am not talking about the abortion debate in the United States.) A right to clean air, for instance, would be inconceivable without the right to life at the base of the liberal edifice.
Liberalism, wrote Francis Fukuyama, “sought to lower the aspirations of politics”. It set a low bar at the beginning: to protect the freedom of worship and life. Nothing more, nothing less. No welfare state, noise regulations, rights to clean air or chlorofluorocarbons bans. It was arguably an easy job for the despotic but somewhat liberalized sovereign: all he had to do was provide security for his subjects and restrain himself from executing his enemies or those accused of committing crimes without something like due process. In our day, this crucial right to life arguably does the opposite: it sets the highest of aims for liberalism given what we know about life and the life-support systems it depends on. The citadels of liberalism will not resist the tide of illiberalism, hatred, war and planetary upheaval if we don’t expand and fundamentally rethink this indivisible right to life.
Get Pablo Austin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Perhaps our teachers didn’t explain things like this, but maybe they should have. The bricks out of which the liberal order is built are the bricks of life. Thomas Hobbes’s right to life meant that one’s armor would remain intact when crossing paths with the king’s guards. Our right to life under the shared atmosphere is something else entirely. It is the nexus of a web of rights on which our shared existence depends. It is a networked right (not a term legal scholars would use) that should not be disentangled from other rights such as the right to clean air, water, nutritious food, sanitation, a healthy ocean and other “solidarity” rights.
Hobbes’s conception of the right entailed a negative obligation for the sovereign, which simply meant “don’t mess with your subjects.” Our right to life means the same but it also multiplies the positive obligations of the state beyond effective policing, fair trails and the maintenance of a well-armed militia. A liberal politics that does not depart from this basic tenet will be on the losing side and permanently under siege. It will slowly dig its own grave and lead us to the worlds of war imagined by our dystopian novelists. It will assume that things will be normal again when the would-be tyrant is gone after four or eight years. It will be a politics that (commendably) fights for things such as childcare assistance and healthcare, but that will neglect to fight for an expanded conception of this fundamental right. Fighting on many technical fronts, it will fail to appreciate how the ancient beauty of the edifice has never been anything other than life. Led astray by mythmakers, ideologues and Machiavellians, it will assume that bombs are bricks and military alliances the cement that holds the edifice together.
The language of the Declaration of Independence lends itself to a more expansive reading of these basic rights, and adds something crucial: “…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men…”. The Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the law of the land, is more circumspect in this respect: “…nor shall any person be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Compared to the Declaration of Independence, this section of the Bill of Rights reads as if it had been written by a scribe of the sovereign in the 17th century, someone who had to grudgingly accept that his master couldn’t do as he please to exact vengeance.
So what to do then? Here’s a start: A liberal civics should concern itself fully with an ecology of rights: the rights of rivers, ocean rights, all the rights of nature. Liberals cannot meet these obligations without the help of the nation state, but as our conceptions of life expand we will also have to question the very idea sovereignty. A forward-looking, visionary liberalism that does not aim to overthrown the “old world of sovereignty”, in the words of the geographer Paul Richardson, will remain a liberalism of fear and military establishments that will only attempt half measures within garrisoned states, if it attempts at all. It will be a poor adversary for the fearful climatic forces that our use of fossil fuels has unleashed. It will celebrate a few Pyrrhic victories here and there, but will be unable to escape the crises and myths of its own making.
Liberalism had modest beginnings as Fukuyama reminds us, but when it cast its lot with life at the very beginning of the liberal story, it bet on something big. Liberals couldn’t have chosen something better to defend.
*
