For example, Francis Fukuyama, a writer who in the early days of the war seemed too hopeful about the scenario of a liberal revival, has now written a questing essay for the State Department on why “liberalism needs the nation” arguing that the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians should teach liberals a lesson about the virtues of national identity.
“By their courage,” he writes, “Ukrainians have made it clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only if those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own.” The war was thus a partial rebuke of the fantasy of a pure cosmopolitanism, of a liberalism that transcends borders, languages and specific histories. And it offers a case study on how the nation-state, its loves and loyalties, can unite a disparate population around a common goal in a way that no supranational institution has ever been able to achieve.
The challenge, however, is that the “sense of national purpose” that Fukuyama touts in Ukraine remarkably relies on an external enemy, a wolf at the door, and you can’t just create such an enemy. (And you shouldn’t want to!) While most of the sources of peacetime national solidarity he cites, from food and sports to literary traditions, are somewhat thinner stuff. And one of the potentially stronger forces, a sense of religious unity within a liberal order, Fukuyama excludes: In a pluralistic society, “the idea of restoring a shared moral tradition defined by religious belief is a non-starter,” which is only but leads to sectarianism and violence if applied.
But that might be too simplistic. You certainly cannot impose strict religious uniformity on a pluralistic democracy. But at least the liberal order in America long relied for solidarity and purpose on a softer religious consensus, a flexible religious center, based on Protestant Christianity and then expanding into a more ecumenical but still biblically rooted vision. From the 19th century through the Civil Rights era, this shared worldview provided not only a generic unity, but a constant moral touchstone for would-be reformers, a metaphysical horizon for the entire American project.
Here Fukuyama’s essay could usefully be supplemented by my colleague Ezra Klein’s recent meditation on how Western liberalism appears when seen through the eyes of its enemies – meaning not just Putinism, with its spurious Christian justifications for an aggressive war, but also certain radical right-wing philosophers who rejected liberalism and Christianity together, seeing the latter as the original source of liberalism’s egalitarianism, its concern for the poor and marginalized, and its restless quest for universal dignity (which reject and despise them all).
