Grappling with Liberalism

“Modern liberalism, equally, cannot go on as it is at the moment, veering toward destruction, becoming ever more decrepit and ineffectual, incapable of meeting the challenges—domestic, geopolitical, planetary—of the 21st century.”

There “used to be Hegelians, now there are nihilists,” complains Pavel Petrovich in Ivan Turgenev’s great 19th century novel Fathers and Sons. The progress-loving liberal aristocrat, a man of the previous age, an age apparently of principles, an age which recognized rights and obligations—the era, that is, preceding the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861—is miffed. Told that nihilism denotes a man “who doesn’t recognize anything,” who “approaches everything from a critical point of view…a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith,” Petrovich curtly responds that a nihilist is a person, rather, “who doesn’t respect anything.”

For Evgeny Vasilev Bazarov, the “abominably cocky” self-professed nihilist at the center of Turgenev’s narrative, simply to condemn everything, or pull everything down, while neglecting to build something new in its place simultaneously is a perfectly legitimate course of action. No, it is the most useful thing a person could do, he proclaims. Cognizant, however, of the inevitable consequences of such rash and violent deeds—the substitution, namely, of “brute Mongol force” for civilization–Petrovich condemns Bazarov’s sentiments as satanically arrogant. The two men, the first a refined, if somewhat prissy and, maybe, complacent, romantic advocate of gradual reform, the second, a long-haired, lowly-born medical student, clinically scientific to the point, almost, of psychopathy, represent in pure form the two poles of generational conflict in post-emancipation Russia that Turgenev identified and depicted so powerfully in his magnificent mid-century novel.

Perhaps it never went away. Perhaps generational conflict, intermingling, of course, with class, gender, and racial antagonisms, has been a historical constant ever since Turgenev wrote, the baton being passed merely from nihilists to anarchists and Marxists to reactionaries and fascists and authoritarians to new liberals and New Dealers to Fabians and social democrats to hippies and New Leftists and onto libertarians and, finally, so-called Third Wayists, according to time and place. Perhaps. But what is certainly clear is that generational conflict is alive and well-thriving, in fact—in today’s Western liberal democracies.