Growing Pains

If you have not been reading David Brooks columns in the New York Times, I suggest you start.  He is, in my opinion, one of the people we most need in our culture right now: a conservative who has not either lost their mind or decided to hide until the current wave of maniacal tribalism subsides.  That Brooks (along with Michael Gerson, George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and a few others) often sounds like a progressive is merely a testimony to how off-center our public discourse has actually become.  Brook's column for today is not merely a commentary on the dominant headlines, but also a crucially useful history of the word Liberal.
In seminary, I was fortunate to have a Church history professor who had decided that the best way to teach history, particularly Church history, was as an evolution of ideas rather than just dates.  You can quickly look up the date of the Council of Nicea or the Diet of Worms and the names of those involved, but to understand the theological and philosophical assumptions that brought about those events is much more valuable.
Brooks does a good job of defining Liberalism, not just as a political point on a spectrum between left and right, but as an underlying assumption that is in fact responsible for much of what we count as human progress over the past thousand years. If you know your history of ideas, you know that Liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment, the age where humanity began to put reason and logic ahead of superstition and magical/mythical understanding.  The Enlightenment brought us out of the dark ages and into what is sometimes called the Modern world.  The Protestant Reformation was the religious child of the Enlightenment, only a Liberal mindset could have dared to challenge the nearly all-powerful Roman Catholic Church.  Martin Luther, John Calvin and their ilk had that deep sense of humility, which at times bordered on paralytic doubt, which kept them from truly wanting to be revolutionaries.  The reason those two particularly have become more commonly associated with the Reformation than say Ulrich Zwingli, is that they both thought that changing the church from within could ultimately be possible.  It took the Roman heresy trial and the attempt to kill Luther and it took Farel's emotional manipulation of Calvin for them to clearly become revolutionaries more than reformers.  Still they held on to the idea of reformation rather than destruction.
Conservatives/reactionaries prefer the status quo or even a regressive movement towards a past they thought more ideal.  Radicals/progressives want the utter inversion of a revolution where the low places are lifted up and the mountains are brought low.  Liberals, as Brooks explains so well, want the existing system to work at its best; if that requires change they lean towards the left, if that requires stability they lean to the right.  Thus they are frustrating to both left and right, because they seem to waffle and prefer to work for incremental, slow and steady change, and are not afraid of compromise or taking a few steps back.
Liberalism obviously has its own set of weaknesses, and those weaknesses have been on full display of late.  Around the world we seem to be pulled towards illiberal regimes.  Figures like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are representative of Liberalism.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were also representative of Liberalism, a fact which eludes many who have come to see the word as a synonym for left-leaning.  Reagan and Thatcher operated in a world where the assumptions of Liberalism were fully in tact and thus were able to engage their right leaning agendas in a very effective way, both of them would be absolutely awash in the current milieu, even though they played a large role in creating what exists now.
What exists now is not healthy, it is essentially the adolescence of what we call Postmodern thinking.  Remember that Liberalism and Modern thought are inherently linked, you can't have one without the other.  Postmodern thought therefore is also in some sense Post-liberal, but obviously this new age has not yet grown up, the tantrums and fits of extremism are symptoms of that, as are the sullen pouts and whining about things not being fair.  Can you tell I live with two teenagers?
One hopes that the Trump era, like the teenage years, ends without irrevocable damage to the psyche of this nation.  In Freudian terms, what we are seeing is the ascendancy of the Id, mercenary lying to suit any purpose, political hedonism, actual hedonism, lack of moral direction, raw self interest, profound narcissism, all things that one associates with adolescence. The Super-ego, that mature part of the psyche that hopefully takes charge in a mature adult, is basically a skinny nerd that the Id easily shoves into a locker at the current moment.  Right now that Liberalism that has been the Super-ego of the world for centuries, now sounds like Jiminy Cricket or a nagging mother, or a Father who says, "of course life isn't fair, nobody ever said life would be fair."
For all the rowdy, Id-dominated chaos of Twitter, it is good to be able to read actual professionally vetted journalists.  I appreciate the Liberal institution of Newspapers (even though I read them mostly on line), more now than I ever have in my life. I really do hope and pray that they survive, they may be our best hope of growing out of this.