Moral Cruelty and the Left

The late scholar Judith Shklar warned that liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue. Her warning is newly urgent today.

To be alive is to be afraid,” Judith Shklar declared in her 1989 essay, “The Liberalism of Fear.” Since her death in 1992, it has become a key text in contemporary political theory, and its author the subject of a growing field of Shklar Studies. Shklar is best known as a defender of the American political tradition against radicalisms of the right and left, and “Liberalism of Fear” provides a compelling justification for our system of limited and democratic government as the best means of protecting us from “physical cruelty” perpetrated by agents of the state. But cruelty is far more complicated than it might appear. Those who fight to eliminate the obvious cruelty of brutality and violence can be no less cruel in their own subtle and sinister ways.

In her brilliant book Ordinary Vices, published five years before “Liberalism of Fear,” Shklar argued that we need to be afraid not only of physical cruelty committed by officials and police, but of the “moral cruelty” committed by those who claim to hate oppression. Drawing on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche—whom she considered one of the most dangerous enemies of liberal democracy—Shklar warned that liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue. As the United States is confronted with (often violent) protests against police violence and an increasingly strident and intolerant political culture of racial “wokeness,” Shklar’s argument that liberalism is endangered by both physical and moral cruelty is of urgent relevance. We have much to fear.

Born into a family of German-speaking Jews in Riga, Latvia, in 1928, Shklar learned fear early in life. At the age of 11 she and her family fled the coming Soviet invasion to Canada. Had she not escaped, she would have almost certainly died in the subsequent German invasion and occupation that killed more than 94% of Latvian Jews. The rest of her life was relatively sedate: a bachelor’s degree at McGill (1949), a Ph.D. (1955), and then a job at Harvard’s Government Department (1956-1992). But four decades of stability in Cambridge did not dull what that childhood experience of vulnerability had taught her.

Shklar insisted in “Liberalism of Fear” that the danger of totalitarian regimes driven by radical ideologies still hung over Western societies. Worse, our usual injunctions to remember those regimes often seem powerless to stop political violence in the present: “We say ‘never again’ but someone somewhere is being tortured right now.” Liberalism, Shklar argued, is our best hope against these dangers—but there is always the risk that our politics may degenerate into authoritarianism or the intonation of ineffectual pieties. We must look, and keep looking, into those parts of ourselves that might desire or permit the return of the worst forms of unfreedom. We must be particularly vigilant, she warned, against the vice of cruelty.

“Liberalism of Fear” outlines a justification of the American system of government as the best means of resisting this vice, of which authoritarian regimes are the most obvious manifestations. With political power divided among multiple branches, subject to democratic controls, and contested by a liberty-loving public, our regime has several lines of defense against authoritarianism. But, as Shklar noted, any time we fear arbitrary “physical suffering” at the hands of agents of the state, we face the summum malum of cruelty, this worst of evils. If we are vigilant against a return of fascism and not against murderous police officers, our liberalism is not worth much.

Shklar’s project is apparently straightforward. A closer consideration of her thoughts elsewhere on the subject of cruelty, however, reveals disorienting paradoxes. In Ordinary Vices, as in the later “Liberalism of Fear,” Shklar argued that liberals should see cruelty as the greatest of evils. But cruelty does not appear only in the form of physical violence, and is not committed only by the state. Shklar suggested that liberalism may be destroyed from within by liberals’ well-intentioned efforts to eradicate cruelty.


https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/judith-shklar-politics-of-fear


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I don't think the greatest threat to liberal democracy today is some so-called "moral cruelty" of the left as outlined in a 31-year-old essay.

I tend to think the greatest threat, rather, is Trumpism and how it's infected the world's most powerful and influential democracy.

Ben Reilly wrote:I don't think the greatest threat to liberal democracy today is some so-called "moral cruelty" of the left as outlined in a 31-year-old essay.

I tend to think the greatest threat, rather, is Trumpism and how it's infected the world's most powerful and influential democracy.

It was the moral cruelty of the left that led people to flock to Trump

Trump is a nightmare and people are starting to see this, but so is so called woke Liberals, who are effectively destroying liberalism from within

Didgee wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:I don't think the greatest threat to liberal democracy today is some so-called "moral cruelty" of the left as outlined in a 31-year-old essay.

I tend to think the greatest threat, rather, is Trumpism and how it's infected the world's most powerful and influential democracy.

It was the moral cruelty of the left that led people to flock to Trump

I don't know.  The people actually came through on the 2016 election/appointment of a president.  Trump actually lost the election tally by some 3-million votes, but won the appointment.

Trump won the appointment by manipulations.  Either, 1) the Russians tampered with the voting machines via the Internet; or, 2) votes were strategically cast in three states, forcing the electoral college to defy the overall plurality.  Maybe both?

The bottom line is, no argument can be built upon a premise that Trump is popular.  He actually lost, and thus was the unpopular choice.

Waffle ..

Tommy Monk wrote:Waffle ..

Nonsense.

People didn't flock to Trump, full stop. He mustered just enough support (about 30,000 people, actually) to game an outdated voting system, using promises he hasn't kept. He's alienated a significant number of people who supported him in 2016, by doing little to nothing for them, and in two instances in particular making life decidedly harder for the low-income white people who make up his base.

Trump wasn't a reaction -- he was a fart that accidentally slipped out.

Ben Reilly wrote:People didn't flock to Trump, full stop. He mustered just enough support (about 30,000 people, actually) to game an outdated voting system, using promises he hasn't kept. He's alienated a significant number of people who supported him in 2016, by doing little to nothing for them, and in two instances in particular making life decidedly harder for the low-income white people who make up his base.

Trump wasn't a reaction -- he was a fart that accidentally slipped out.

well that was the fault of the Dems for not providing a decent candidate

guess folk felt that a rogue fart in the form of donald trump was still preferable to full on dysentery in the form of hilary clinton

gelico wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:People didn't flock to Trump, full stop. He mustered just enough support (about 30,000 people, actually) to game an outdated voting system, using promises he hasn't kept. He's alienated a significant number of people who supported him in 2016, by doing little to nothing for them, and in two instances in particular making life decidedly harder for the low-income white people who make up his base.

Trump wasn't a reaction -- he was a fart that accidentally slipped out.

well that was the fault of the Dems for not providing a decent candidate

guess folk felt that a rogue fart in the form of donald trump was still preferable to full on dysentery in the form of hilary clinton

Most of America preferred the dysentry (to use your term lol) let's never forget that. Most of American voters never wanted Trump.

gelico wrote:well that was the fault of the Dems for not providing a decent candidate

She was a female...big mistake.  The American system will not cast a female in the top job.  Would anyone cast a female for Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?

In the Parliamentary system, the PM is elected by peers.  Not so in the American system.  Even if a female candidate gets the popular vote, the electors won't stand for it.

It's a fact. There has never, ever been a female president of the US.