Classical Liberalism needs constant defense and support

From Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet by Cathy Young.

Growing up in Sweden and England in the 1970s, the shadow of communist Soviet Union was dark over Europe. They were the dangerous, lurking neighbor no one really wanted to discuss openly but who is watched intently because they are so dangerous.

Bursting from the barren Siberian tundra, Solzhenitsyn, like some wild-eyed bearded ancient prophet, shouted to the world of the evils not only of Gulags and Stalin but of the whole godless, immoral utilitarian Marxist system. He forced a conversation everyone wished to avoid having.

He was a bright literary star but a thinker too hot and erratic for anyone to stare at to long or even stand near. As much as you might agree with him on one profound point, you would disagree on another. He was a catalyst for clearer thinking but not one with an especially clear or coherent philosophy himself. Or so it seemed to me.

Young does not change that opinion but there is a lot of interesting discussion in the essay itself as well as in the comments.

The 100th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s birth on December 11 was an occasion for many tributes. A decade after his death, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the past century’s towering figures in both literature and public life. His role in exposing the crimes of the Soviet regime is a historic achievement the magnitude of which can hardly be overstated. But his legacy also continues to be the subject of intense debate among people who share his loathing of that regime—and those controversies, which have to do with freedom, traditional morality, and nationalism, are strikingly relevant to our current moment.

[snip]

None of that lessens what Solzhenitsyn accomplished. One of millions who survived the infernal machine of Stalin-era “correctional labor camps,” he turned that ordeal into literature. His short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the Soviet magazine Novy Mir in 1962, its publication greenlit thanks to Nikita Khrushchev’s push for de-Stalinization. Its effects, both at home and abroad, were explosive: while Stalin’s Great Terror had been discussed before, its victims had never been so powerfully brought to life.

But Solzhenitsyn was just getting started. Changing tides in the Kremlin, where Khrushchev was deposed and the new leadership under Leonid Brezhnev was quick to slam the brakes on liberalization, cut off all avenues for publication at home. Finding a platform abroad, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” That was three years before the appearance of the masterwork forever associated with his name, the nonfiction epic The Gulag Archipelago, based in large part on the thousands of letters to Solzhenitsyn and to Novy Mir with first-person accounts by former prisoners. The gulag—the name of the Soviet agency in charge of the camps, an abbreviation for “chief administration of correctional labor camps”—became internationally known as a symbol of totalitarian evil.

Solzhenitsyn not only denounced the ghost of Stalinism; he also made a compelling case that the evil was in communist ideology itself and that Stalinism was merely the logical conclusion of Leninism, which treated human beings as material for social engineering.

In exile, Solzhenitsyn turned to harsh criticism of the West, not just for failing to stand up to the Soviet regime and fully confront its malevolence but for the sins of excessive materialism, personal and sexual liberation, and irreligion. Increasingly, his polemical zeal was also directed at ex-Soviet dissidents who were to his left ideologically—a few Marxists of the “Soviet socialism isn’t real socialism” variety, but mostly advocates of Western-style liberal democracy and markets who criticized not only communism but pre-communist Russia’s authoritarian traditions. Their dispute culminated in Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 essay “Our Pluralists,” which blasted his opponents as arrogant Russia-haters fixated on pluralism as “the supreme good.” To Solzhenitsyn, the worship of pluralism inevitably led to moral relativism and loss of universal values, which he believed had “paralyzed” the West. He also warned that if the communist regime in Russia were to fall, the “pluralists” would rise, and “their thousand-fold clamor will not be about the people’s needs … not about the responsibilities and obligations of each person, but about rights, rights, rights”—a scenario that, in his view, could result only in another national collapse.

There is much more.

It is a useful reminder. I am marginally concerned that people seem to have blotted out anything since before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1991. We live in an era without context where the Mandarin Class is infected with all the neo-Marxist lite philosophies of social justice, postmodernism, deconstructionism, anti-colonialism, multiculturalism, critical theory, etc. and with no seeming recollection of the inherent evil of those ideas as demonstrated time and again.

It is also a useful reminder that the Achille's heel of Classical Liberalism is that its very openness ensures that it is constantly exposed to the incompatible philosophies of power and control such as Marxism. Classical Liberalism is always under attack by those who are natively aligned to coercion and suppression.

I don't view the attack of the neo-marxists as a signal of defeat. The language and slogans and the antics might change from decade to decade but there is nothing to suggest to me that there is any existential threat to Classical Liberalism. It is being attacked not because it is failing but because it is succeeding. Nevertheless, Classical Liberalism needs constant defense and support.