By Telos Press · Thursday, October 1, 2020 Now available from Telos Press Publishing: The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, by Fred Siegel. Order your copy today in our online store and save 20% off the list price. Also available in Kindle ebook format.
 The Crisis of Liberalism
Prelude to Trump
by Fred Siegel
With a Foreword by Joel Kotkin
In The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, Fred Siegel leverages New York City to uncover the key political conflicts and social contradictions in American liberalism over the last century. This wide-ranging collection of essays critically recounts how passionate intellectual debates over how to realize “the good life” in the modern city emerged from the writings of early progressive “thought leaders,” who envisioned a new educated elite capable of enlightened democratic governance. The flaws in this approach, as Siegel shows, expressed themselves most floridly in John Lindsay’s New York, whose flashy limousine liberals were a preview of today’s politically correct gentry liberalism. Its cultural programs over the past half-century repeatedly failed the downtrodden underclass and alienated middle-class New Yorkers trapped in economic stagnation. By neglecting voters’ real concerns over illegal immigration and China’s emerging threats, globalist technocratic liberals ultimately set the stage for Donald Trump’s angry nationalist demand to put “America First.”
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Over the last fifty years, the West has witnessed a continuous decline in the quality of the state and its activities, along with a cultural deterioration of the public sphere. All OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have also undergone a massive dichotomization of private property ownership: An ever-smaller fraction of the population owns a growing share of all non-public assets. According to some estimates, the richest one percent holds 70 to 80 percent of all global private property, while an increasing number owns nothing and is excluded from decent incomes and the means to live a normal family life.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, August 26, 2020 The following essay comments on the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen conducted by Moritz Schwarz and published in Junge Freiheit on August 14, 2020. An English translation of the interview appears here.
In the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that liberal democracy was on an inexorable victory march around the world. The Soviet satellite states threw off their Communist shackles, and the occupied Baltics regained their independence. Even Russia seemed briefly to be lurching toward modern governance structures, and the Central Asian states, the “stans,” claimed their own sovereignty (if only, often as not, to revert to indigenous forms of authoritarianism). The age of Latin American dictatorships belonged to the past, certainly in the southern cone and in Brazil, although not in Venezuela and Cuba. The last aftershocks of that democratic optimism informed the hope that toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq would set off a similar democracy wave in the Middle East; no doubt the demonstration of the vulnerability of the dictator in Baghdad set the stage for the Arab Spring of 2011, another burst of hope.
That Arab Spring of hope gave way to a new winter in the Middle East and not only there. The wave of democracy has been followed by a wave of repression. Perhaps one should have paid more attention in 1989, which not only witnessed the November celebration in Berlin but also the bloody June in Beijing, where the democracy movement at Tiananmen was murdered by the Communist Party and its tanks. It was wrong to assume that the formal end of the Soviet Union meant the end of Communism altogether or that Communist agitation would cease to undermine free societies. That old mole continues to burrow.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, August 18, 2020 The pandemic crisis has surfaced fundamental tensions between the scope of state power and commitments to democracy and dissent. Facing an emergency, the state must act vigorously, but liberal democracies are premised on understandings of basic rights, maximal freedom, and limited government, desiderata at odds with state power. This opposition has been playing out in different ways in the United States and in Europe, and in Europe nowhere more saliently than in Germany.
A recent controversy in Germany provides insight into the process by which the need to respond to the pandemic acts as a vehicle to enhance state power in a way that threatens basic freedoms. This is the core conflict: the genuine urgency of developing public health measures to contain the pandemic can contribute simultaneously to the augmentation of state power. Questions of the vitality of democracy are at stake, and not only in Germany.
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By Arta Khakpour · Wednesday, July 22, 2020 In 1972, Irving Kristol noted the striking fact that the New Left seemed to lack a coherent economic critique of the status quo, besides occasional Marxist platitudes borrowed from the Old Left:
The identifying marks of the New Left are its refusal to think economically and its contempt for bourgeois society precisely because this is a society that does think economically.
What really ailed American society, and what the New Left could sense but not articulate, Kristol wrote, was a spiritual malady. Despite the efforts of Burkean conservatives, the “accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy” had been steadily depleting since the French Revolution, and with its depletion, so too society’s abilities to cope with the material inequalities, resentments, and indignities made inevitable by the free exchange of goods and services.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, April 9, 2020  Once upon a time, there was an illusion that the state would disappear. It was the fiction Marxists told each other at bedtime, and it was the lie of the Communists, once they had seized state power. For even as they built up their police apparatus and their archipelago of gulags, they kept promising that one day the state would eventually disappear.
Of course, in a sense, they were right because Communism ended and so did the Communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet the death of those regimes is in no way an argument for the death of statehood itself.
The state is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the ability of national communities to decide their own fates. Such independence is far from obsolete, and certainly not for the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union. After years of Russian occupation, they have regained their state sovereignty. They will continue to insist on it, and rightly so.
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