THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 81
tant, insisting that “Russia’s tragedy
was that reform came too slowly, not
too fast.”
“
W
ho can trust Trump’s America?”
a recent Economist cover story
asked, forlornly surveying the ruins of
the Pax Americana. The political earth-
quakes of the past few years perhaps
make it lonelier at the top for the mag-
azine than at any other time
in its history; the articles cel-
ebrating last year’s anniver-
sary were presented as a
manifesto for “renewing lib-
eralism.” Ten years before,
when the financial crisis
erupted, the magazine over-
came its primal distrust of
government intervention to
endorse bank bailouts, argu-
ing that it was “a time to put
dogma and politics to one side.” It also
continued to defend neoliberal policies,
on the basis that “the people running
the system, not the system itself, are to
blame.” Now, finally chastened, if not
by the financial crisis then by its grisly
political upshot, the magazine has con-
ceded that “liberals have become too
comfortable with power” and “wrapped
up in preserving the status quo.” Its an-
niversary manifesto touted a “liberalism
for the people.” But soul-searching has
its limits: the manifesto admiringly
quoted Milton Friedman on the need
to be “radical,” resurrected John Mc-
Cain’s fantasy of a “league of democra-
cies” as an alternative to the United Na-
tions, and scoffed at millennials who
don’t wish to fight for the old “liberal
world order.” A more recent cover story
warns “American bosses” about Eliza-
beth Warren’s plans to tackle inequal-
ity, and revives Friedmanite verities about
how “creative destruction” and “the dy-
namic power of markets” can best help
“middle-class Americans.”
The Economist is no doubt sincere
about wanting to be more “woke.” It
seeks more female readers, according to
a 2016 briefing for advertisers, and is
anxious to dispel the idea that the mag-
azine is “an arrogant, dull handbook for
outdated men.” Whereas, in 2002, it
rushed to defend Bjørn Lomborg, the
global-warming skeptic, this fall it ded-
icated an entire issue to the climate
emergency. Still, The Economist may find
it more difficult than much of the old
Anglo-American establishment to check
its privilege. Its limitations arise not only
from a defiantly nondiverse and paro-
chial intellectual culture but also from
a house style too prone to contrarian-
ism. A review, in 2014, of a book titled
“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slav-
ery and the Making of American Cap-
italism” accused its author of not being
“objective,” complaining that
“almost all the blacks in his
book are victims, almost all
the whites villains.” Follow-
ing an outcry, the magazine
retracted the review. How-
ever, a recent assessment of
Brazil’s privatization drive—
“Jair Bolsonaro is a danger-
ous populist, with some good
ideas”—suggests that it is
hard to tone down what the
journalist James Fallows has described
as the magazine’s “Oxford Union argu-
mentative style,” a stance too “cocksure
of its rightness and superiority.”
This insouciance, bred by the cer-
tainty of having made the modern world,
cannot seem anything but incongruous
in the rancorously polarized societies of
Britain and the United States. The two
blond demagogues currently leading the
world’s two oldest “liberal” democracies
bespeak a ruling class that—through a
global financial crisis, rising inequality,
and ill-conceived military interventions
in large parts of the Middle East, Cen-
tral Asia, and North Africa—has squan-
dered its authority and legitimacy. The
reputation, central to much Cold War
liberalism, of England as a model lib-
eral society also lies shattered amid the
calamity of Brexit.
For the young, in particular, old frame-
works of liberalism seem to be a con-
straint on the possibilities of politics. It
should be remembered, however, that
these new critics of liberalism seek not
to destroy but to fulfill its promise of in-
dividual freedom. They are looking, just
as John Dewey was, for suitable modes
of politics and economy in a world rad-
ically altered by capitalism and technol-
ogy—a liberalism for the people, not just
for their networked rulers. In that sense,
it is not so much liberalism that is in cri-
sis as its self-styled campaigners, who
are seen, not unreasonably, as complicit
in unmaking the modern world.
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