Liberals without Ideas.

I found this interesting passage by an ex-Yale ACS president Ian Bassin to be startlingly on point:

Ask a group of self-described liberal law students to articulate what they stand for and you’re likely to get either rambling, incoherent replies or blank stares. Those who do answer may touch upon issues ranging from equality to opportunity to reproductive freedom, but are unlikely to be able to unite these ideas under any consistent philosophical framework. Those who have a philosophical framework are lucky if they can explain it in less than 30,000 words.

The single greatest problem of contemporary legal liberalism is that too many of us are at a loss for words to describe what we stand for. One irony is that our past success may be to blame for this current failure. Many of us grew up in such liberal atmospheres that we were never challenged to defend liberal principles or to even grapple with the difficult questions at their core. As American society has polarized over the last generation—mine is the first for whom red and blue are defining traits—more of us have grown up in homogenous intellectual spheres. Instead of having our peers challenge our ideas, we play yes men to ourselves, nodding in agreement on what we believe without ever having to utter a definitive phrase. . . .

Compare this with what a conservative at many of today’s left-leaning law schools must experience. In most of her classes, the only conservative voice she hears is her own. In order to cling to her beliefs, she must defend them tenaciously with both friend and foe. Confronted with a chorus of opposing arguments, her education is an intellectual boot camp. She’s been tested, her positions forged in fire, and she’s emerged a refined soldier for her cause. The liberal, on the other hand, has spent his period of intellectual maturation on the couch so to speak. Every once in a while either throwing or receiving that knowing look, but never having to exert too much effort to get it right. While the conservative emerges muscular and defined, the liberal is paunchy and a bit slow.

I think he's absolutely right (except for "the conservative emerging muscular and defined" part). I'm not entirely sure that he's working within the right framework though, that is, I think liberalism is inherently aware of and constantly grappling with complexity, which leads to an inability to subsume policy preferences under a single principle. I think the unwillingness to bend to some unified theory of human existence and interaction is what fragments liberal thought and liberal politics...and I'm not entirely sure this is a fixable problem.

I've been working on my own ideas over the past few years, and I would have to say that I'm not sure I've gotten any closer to an answer either. I attempted to formulate the early stages of what I actually believed while sitting in an airport two weeks ago, but it came out...rambling and 30,000 words long...but I hope (!) that that arises out of a need to emphasize subtleties, nuance, and incorporation of those devilish little inconsistencies rather than a lack of belief.

Anyhow, I really didn't get anywhere with this post...just thought that it was an interesting passage, and since I don't have anyone to talk to about this stuff here, I thought I'd put it up here.