Liberalism: a joke, literally

This is, of necessity, beyond reason and language. Detecting and responding to a common source of value is distinctly personal and localized, contingent on being open and attentive to what shines forth before us, from moment to moment. The solution is to eschew pre-emptive solutions from the top-down. We're all Artists, like Kanye claims, with ultimate success driven from the bottom-up, with the individual guided by social norms. Crucially, this is itself dependent on society acknowledging the irony: Science and politics will only be effective if we first accept their limitations.

It was hoped, perhaps, the 44^th American president, clever and audacious, would speak directly to the West's emotional concern that, having built the necessary-but-insufficient infrastructure, we might then lack the courage to let go and trust absolutely in the human heart to realize our metaphysical hopes and dreams. Alas, to address this fear, one must have already conquered it, a rare achievement indeed amongst those indebted to institutional power. Try, timidly as he did, Barack Obama couldn't "go Bulworth" and put it all on the line.

And the electoral response to the failed exceptionalism? Elect an anti-intellectual demagogue, prone to go with gut feel.

Yes, unfiltered feelings that disregard facts, hierarchy and real-world practicalities, whether emanating from the White House, Pope Francis or Emma González, are usually pseudo-Art, cheap emotion that seems to delight in chaos.

But here's the thing: it's less confused and destructive than an out-of-touch establishment that refuses to heed Kanye's advice to "stop thinking so much."

It's a similar story in places like Hungary, which are aware of the West's hypocrisy and faintheartedness. Our polite authoritarian state is no triumph. Freedom does not lurk at one end of a continuum of compromise – its dignity transcends the relativities of Science. Moreover, it's dangerously naïve to believe more-of-the-same secular liberalism, with or without Donald Trump, will eventually win out.

"Under communism it was clear that communism was to prevail in every cell of social life, and that the Communist Party was empowered with the instruments of brutal coercion and propaganda to get the job done," writes Ryszard Legutko in The Demon in Democracy. "Under liberal democracy such official guardians of constitutional doctrine do not exist, which, paradoxically, makes the overreaching nature of the system less tangible, but at the same time more profound and difficult to reverse."

Sullivan wraps up his column with a George Orwell observation. Fascism could never take hold in Britain, he believed, because people would giggle if they saw soldiers goose-stepping down the street. Humor is a "safety value and a reality check," our most resilient enemy of zealotry. Shame, then, he and other intellectuals, overly serious in their analysis of our plight, are unable to frame the joke and its punchline.

Democracy is being assailed because it's time to risk what we think matters, for the spiritual fulfilment of what truly matters, what lies outside the liberal order. And if we don't risk it, all that has been accomplished will be lost to hubris, in any case.

Kanye, one more time: "What would you do today if you are not afraid of the consequences of failure?"