Beauty and the Ballot Box at Harvard
By Nathan Kahana
On Monday, Jon Baskin, Becca Rothfeld, and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein discussed the aesthetics of liberalism at a Harvard Public Culture Project event. Baskin and Rothfeld are both editors at The Point magazine, and Rothfeld is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. The conversation was moderated by English professor James Wood.
The discussion was sparked by an article written by Rothfeld in The Point, where she argued that liberalism fails to attract adherents because it lacks a clear conception of the “good life,” a portrait of beauty that we can look to to guide our actions and endow our lives with meaning. Her article directed its criticism towards a recent book authored by Sunstein, In Defense of Liberalism. She claimed the book failed to focus on the principal limitation of liberalism: not its lack of cogent arguments, but its lack of a compelling aesthetic. In other words, while the “bad art” liberalism produces has little to do with the value of its arguments, it is nevertheless responsible for the growing unpopularity of liberalism and the appeal of traditionalist political ideologies.
According to Rothfeld, the solution to this problem lies in the potential of liberalism to provide “a home for great art and culture” – in other words, a set of spaces where aesthetics can flourish. She pointed to the Partisan Review, a now-defunct literary magazine, as one such space. She argued that a moral framework with pluralism as one of its core tenets cannot provide a single coherent vision for the good life. Rather, a liberal society must strive to foster a multiplicity of visions, while retaining the conviction that such visions cannot affect policy-making.
In contrast, Sunstein presented a more traditional argument for liberalism. “The liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic,” he argued, but rather the “content of policy.” Baskin, meanwhile, was more pessimistic about liberalism’s aesthetic prospects; “the left is very good about producing criticism,” he argued, but lacks the capacity to offer a constructive vision for the future.
Rothfeld’s diagnosis of the problem is admirable, and her analysis of the limitations of liberalism is both insightful and honest. Her solution, however, does not adequately solve the problem. A framework that sequesters our vision of the good life to the realm of “private” expression will fail when that vision has sufficient strength. The strong vision that conservatism provides, in contrast, cannot be separated from its implications in policy; even if it should be separated, the nature of the problem makes it unlikely that conservatives will stop at private expression. In other words, a liberal framework cannot survive confrontation with a strong conservative vision.
We have seen this play out most obviously in Trump’s second election. Many critics seek to paint his leadership as an “autocracy,” appealing to liberal values in order to undermine his legitimacy. But these appeals to liberalism have had little effect in changing his popularity with the electorate. Rather, the failure to effectively weaponize liberal values demonstrates just how brittle liberal frameworks are. Even if the protestations were true, they would say more about liberalism’s insufficient durability than Trump’s alleged authoritarianism.