The media’s house conservatives are now being permitted to wonder if perhaps maybe things were allowed to go just a little too far in ignoring the will of the people:
Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy, as did Egypt under the short reign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.
Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (signed by the Obama administration but never ratified by Congress), are a third.
Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.
That’s the ideal that much of the West essentially abandoned in recent years. On the political left but also the center-right, postliberal policymaking largely determined the outcome of the two most basic political questions: First, who is “us”? And second, who decides for us?
Merkel never sought the approval of German voters to relax the country’s immigration laws and take in nearly a million people over the space of a year. Americans didn’t elect President Joe Biden on any promise to let in millions of migrants over the southern border. Post-Brexit Britons never thought they’d bring in an astounding 4.5 million immigrants to a country of just 69 million between 2021 and 2024 — under Tory leaders, no less.
No wonder the reaction to years of postliberal governance has been a broad turn to its preliberal opposite.
The conservative solution, of course, is not solution.
There’s something partisans of the center-right and center-left could do: Instead of discreetly murmuring that, say, Merkel or Biden got immigration policy wrong or that it was morally and economically right but politically foolish, they can grasp the point that control over borders is a sine qua non of national sovereignty, that mass migration without express legislative consent is politically intolerable, that migrants ought to be expected to accept, not reject, the values of the host country and that hosts should not be expected to adapt themselves to values at odds with a liberal society.
Forget that. The nationalist position is moral, just, and perfectly easy to understand.
You didn’t ask us for permission when you brought them here. We don’t need your permission to send them home.
DISCUSS ON SG
