On Liberalism that Endures

 

Defeat is a great teacher. It taught me that liberalism endures because it’s a way of being and a set of values that tell us who we should try to be. This is what gives liberalism its hidden resilience, its capacity to rebuild after political reversals. If we want to rebuild, we’ll need to recover what the word used to mean. It once was a synonym for generosity. In the old days, a liberal gentleman was a generous man. We’ll want to discard these male, elitist associations by marrying generosity to the egalitarian individualism at the core of the liberal creed. The creed tells us we’re no better than anybody else but also no worse. What liberals value should be within everyone’s reach. A liberal person wants to be generous, open, alive to new possibility, willing to learn from anyone. We want to share whatever wealth and fortune we have, to welcome strangers to our table, to stand up for people when they’re in trouble. We know we have to change our minds when someone’s idea is better than ours. We have faith that history rewards those willing to fight for what they believe. Now, none of us is ever as generous as we’d like to be, and no liberal has a monopoly on generosity, but the largeness of spirit it calls us to does define our horizon of hope. Such values are embattled today, and they need defending because our societies so desperately need largeness of spirit, together with a revived liberal ideal of solidarity. We need to be filling out this vision and bringing our citizens to believe in it. Defeat has taught me we can’t afford to jettison our values when the tides of politics turn against us. Liberalism’s incorrigible vitality comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, provided that we are willing to fight for it and never surrender to the passing fashions of despair.

-Canadian Michael Ignatief in the WaPost