The Center of Gravity
I've been talking a lot recently about the idea of a new ideological coalition in which the main political alternatives are no longer left versus right but liberal versus illiberal—that is, advocacy of a free society versus advocacy of some form of left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism. The idea is to gather together traditional 20th-Century center-left "liberals," more market-friendly "neoliberals," "classical liberals" on the right, and libertarians, and work together to defend a free society against the pro-censorship left and the nationalist right.
A lot of people are ripe for this idea, but nobody is doing all that much to make it happen. So I decided to start a new project to see how far we can take it.
I am launching a new online publication called Symposium. The idea is to bring the various strains of "liberals" together to debate what a free society means, what is required for it, and how that applies to a whole range of specific issues.
The way I think of this is that it's the sort of publication where you could get, say, Steven Pinker and George Will together to talk about what "liberalism" means.
And yes, I have already recorded exactly that conversation.
You will notice, by the way, a surprising amount of agreement between the two men. The big agreement they arrived at toward the end is that the foundation of liberalism is individualism. So you can see the intellectual promise of this enterprise.
The point of Symposium is to promote a crucial change in intellectual perspective, from left vs. right to liberal vs. illiberal—and to give advocates of individualism a role in shaping that perspective.
I'm reminded of a passage in The Fountainhead where the totalitarian intellectual Ellsworth Toohey is describing his life-work.
Don't you find it interesting to see a huge, complicated piece of machinery, such as our society, all levers and belts and interlocking gears, the kind that looks as if one would need an army to operate it--and you find that by pressing your little finger against one spot, the one vital spot, the center of all its gravity, you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron?
I, too, am trying to identify and push on one vital spot, a center of gravity--not to knock the machinery of our society down, but to push it back up.