“Leftist infantilism” and “revolutionary infantilism” are among the terms used to refer to the rush to embrace noble ideas when they are stripped of the contexts, processes and ramifications on various dimensions and fluctuations of human affairs. Liberalism is one of the most important schools of political philosophy to have influenced the course of human life. Premised on the belief in the inherent freedom of individuals to organise their societies and governments, its applications have undergone various degrees of success and changes, much as has been the case with the other political belief systems. But liberalism is no exception to the phenomenon of infantilism. We have seen this manifested after the recent US handover of power from the white nationalist camp led by Donald Trump to a form of liberalism under Joe Biden. This is a liberalism whose purity is contested by the progressives who want to apply it literally, especially abroad, while the centrists are less zealous because they believe there is still a lot to work on domestically if the US is to live up to the liberal ideal. The rivalry between these two camps is as old as the American Revolution. They have locked horns from the French Revolution, which threatened to export its principles of “freedom, brotherhood and equality” to the newly independent American interior, through the Civil War (1860-1865) to the Civil Rights Act in the mid 1960s.
Today, President Biden, as Democratic Party leader, is trying to keep both sides happy. The result is a “liberalist infantilism” that divides the world between “democrats” and “authoritarians” while ignoring crucial issues related to racism and the pandemic in the US. This arbitrary division of the world led to the tragic Ukraine crisis. It was a response to China and Russia, which felt it necessary to revise a world order that cared little about internal conditions in countries struggling with economic and social development, and it was a response to the declining popularity of the president and his party in favour of the Republicans. As a consequence the US finds itself in the most dangerous confrontation it has had since the end of the Cold War.
This has not precipitated a fresh debate between camps in American democratic liberalism which has never brought itself to a real examination of the failure of its applications despite the globalisation process that the US has steered during the last three decades. A case in point is Ukraine where democracy has not helped much to address demographic and cultural divides or to provide an inclusive model of citizenship for all Ukrainians regardless of ethnic and linguistic affiliation. Instead, what we find in US discourse is another instance of extreme reductionism on extremely complex issues due to a certain laziness or superficiality in the approach to countries and events overseas. One manifestation of this discourse is the clash between the Washington Post and The Atlantic over the “legitimacy” (from a liberal perspective) of an interview the latter conducted with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman.
Needless to say, neither periodical - both pillars of the US political and academic establishment - had undertaken the necessary intellectual footwork about the kingdom and, specifically, about the breakthroughs it has achieved in only a few years thanks to a comprehensive reformist revolution that embraces diverse historic, geographic, social and economic dimensions of the country and, moreover, that has had the courage to grapple with the relationship between religion and the state and related questions that had once been “too sensitive” to touch.
In their debate, both the Washington Post and The Atlantic betrayed a determination to overlook crucial issues. One was the prevailing stereotype of Saudi Arabia until just a few years ago as an ultra conservative, fundamentalist, insular country where women were not allowed to drive. They ignored, secondly, the developmental boom that took place across the country from the Gulf to the Red Sea through a process that entailed absorbing and mobilising the highest levels of technological progress the world has achieved in the course of successive industrial revolutions over the past two centuries. As a result, they ignored the rapid evolution of the Saudi nation state from its establishment to its third reincarnation, with all that has entailed, including the implementation of the principle of citizenship as a foundation of the state. The two periodicals also failed to make an informed comparison between Saudi Arabian progress and that of other countries, including the US and its swings from neoconservatives (George Bush Jr) to neoliberals (Barack Obama) to white conservatives (Donald Trump) to the current liberals (Joe Biden) whose place on the ideological spectrum is hard to pin down. In fact, the debate between The Atlantic and the Washington Post has less to do with Saudi Arabia than the attempt to define and codify liberalism and its relationship to “knowledge” of the truth. But none of the participants brought up America’s own experience in dealing with itself or the world abroad.
In fact, the US experience is very rich and there can be no denying its successes in Germany and Japan after a world war that destroyed both, even if there is a large gap between the liberalism in those two countries today than the one Americans are talking about. But what concerns us here is more recent history, most notably the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq where experiments in political engineering failed to produce societies cut to the patterns specified by US liberals that did not take into account actual realities on the ground. Amazingly, even after the US exit from Afghanistan, after handing that country back to the Taliban on a silver platter, no one bothered to ask whether this was the consequence of a bankruptcy in engineering state-building projects abroad. Rather, the US came up with Biden’s democracy summit which further split an already divided world at a time when it still needed to work together to stop a deadly pandemic. In like manner, the American solution to Iraq - a constitution that resolved nothing, a quota system that could not produce a cabinet and a political system that lacked the ability to run the country - reflects less on the performance of the current government than it does on US management of government in other countries.
The debate between The Atlantic and the Washington Post, which expresses the views of a large segment of the establishment in Washington and many on the eastern seaboard, epitomises at once the absence of reality in American thought and the certitude with which it approaches the world. Unfortunately, the effect is to cut off America from the rest of the world. The problem, and perhaps a source of crisis, is that this does not affect the US alone, however unified or divided it may be. In fact, it introduces no small amount of anarchy in other countries and more than enough dissension and dispute in the international order.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 17 March, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
Short link: