Noah Smith on the Future of Liberalism in a post-Woke, post-Trump World

Excellent essay from Noah Smith, Where Does a  Liberal Go from Here? The subtitle is, "Our movement overreached and crashed. But the fundamental ideals are still just as powerful."

Imagine being a French liberal in the year 1815. You spent your youth dreaming of an end to tyranny and the stultification of the estate society, reading the works of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Diderot, talking of liberty with your friends in cafes. Yours was not among the names that history would remember from that era, but you once attended a salon in a rich woman’s house in Paris. You were not part of the mob that stormed the Bastille in 1789, but you felt your heart leap when you heard the news, because you knew that now everything would change. When you read the terms of the Constitution of 1791, you saw the fulfillment of your youthful daydreams become the solid fabric of a new reality.

Imagine, then, standing in 1815, a quarter century after the Revolution, looking back at what it had all become. That first bright rush of freedom had given way, first to the murderous insanity of the Terror and the Committee for Public Safety, then to the thuggish new imperialism and endless bloody wars of Napoleon, and finally to the fall of all Europe to conservative reaction under the Congress of Vienna. Imagine looking back on the arc of your beliefs, your movement, and your life, now as an old man, with no prospects for another, better Revolution ahead of you.

Would you think your dreams had failed? Would you decide that everything you had believed had been an illusion, and that freedom, democracy, and the Rights of Man were false idols that led only to chaos and bloodshed?

If so, you would be utterly wrong. 

After a long tour of liberal/progressive follies, which have led a year when, despite Trump, 64% of Americans dislike the Democratic Party, Smith writes:

I’ve spent much of the year since Trump’s election constructing the litany of progressivism’s sins and overreaches. That job is now complete, but the question is: Where does a liberal go from here? Those of us who grew up in the late 20th century liberal dream are now standing on the beach by the hulk of our wrecked ship, staring out to sea and contemplating our next move.

America is now unquestionably in a more conservative era. People crave law and order in their cities. They have soured on woke culture and progressive spending programs. They are groping around for reasons to re-embrace traditional values. This really is Europe after the Congress of Vienna — perhaps not just in the United States, but across much of the world.

I agree with this completely. Americans may turn against Trump, but not toward Progressivism. In this conservative, nervous era, the path forward for liberalism is away from new ideas and back to the tried and true: good government, anti-corruption, excellence in schools, better health care, equal rights rather than "equity." Smith concludes like this:

So that’s what you do if you’re a French liberal in 1815. You try again. Looking back at history, we see that the project of human freedom and dignity has had plenty of low points, but that so far it has always recovered. Even if you’re old, you pick yourself up and move onward. Even if you’ve made mistakes and supported one or two bad ideas for a while, you get back on track and learn from your errors. Even if you don’t know exactly where liberalism goes from here, you sit down and you think and you read and you talk to smart people until you figure out a new direction. You try again.

Let's.