The cultural battle is fundamental in liberalism

A review of Antonelle Marty the term “cultural battle” and its use in the field of liberalism because, according to the author, they are incompatible. Among other statements, Marty understands that the phrase “cultural battle is misleading and contradictory, since culture evolves through open discussions, in a “free society, without coercion and impositions”, while maintaining that it is a distinction between “pure” and “impure”, typical of the conservative right.

However, it is possible to oppose from liberalism itself, and at the same time without denying the conceptual preeminence of spontaneous order, that politics and the state are also expressions of culture, which concentrate the means of coercion that actually allow the spread of factual and ideological conditions for the amplification of collectivism and statism in all its forms, producing the greatest possible seat of liberalism, insofar as it represents a skeptical and critical manifestation of the political authority, and insofar as liberals do not engage in political action, a position the author seems to defend.

This kind of liberal idealism in which the political media and their intervention in culture are immediately branded as illegitimate because they threaten the spontaneous order, and where it seems that it is hardly possible to give in to propagandist impositions by statists not only rejects liberal political practice but obviously facilitates the handing over of the “battlefield” to socialists of all parties. If we really want liberal ideas to triumph, we must occupy all the necessary places under the inclusive premise of “this and that”, and not under that exclusive of “this or this”.

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If “culture does not grow by fighting”, can one hope that liberal ideas will ever predominate in the social and political arena as a result of some sort of spontaneous social conversion, or can such a prodigy not be expected only through works and speeches? liberal intellectuals? Why would these latter be qualified as “culture”, and not those stemming from the referents, publicists and political activists of liberalism? Again, political media is not part of the culture? However, admitting this does not, of course, mean legitimizing political coercion, but referring to a fuller description of the existing reality.

This mutilated view of culture that makes the mistake of identifying what is with what should be also reveals a serious limitation that minimizes the mechanisms of political power and its true social influence. Beyond the authentic theoretical distinctions within liberalism, it must in practice be recognized as a committed realism if it intends to broaden its field and transform reality without being confused with conservatism, as liberals have done. of the 19th century, beginning with Alberdi himself and the other members of Generation 37, who did not hesitate to assume positions of compromise, involved themselves in political action with the urgent and unavoidable objective of overcoming the Rosas dictatorship. Without Caseros and Pavón, there would not have been a liberal constitution in 1853, nor the emergence of a political and cultural order which, in the context of a poor and backward country, laid the local foundations of capitalism and of the growth that, in less than half a century, has made Argentina the richest country in the world.

On the other hand, the exclusive academic liberals who treat with suspicion and disqualify any attempt by other liberals to involve themselves in concrete political action and influence the culture of this sphere – as if the latter were illiberals -, appear as solipsists indifferent to the infamous consequences of the advance of statist collectivism, and take refuge in a purely intellectual and aseptic purism, assimilated in this sense to the essentialist purism of the conservative right that they seek to challenge.

Moreover, if liberal political action is a priori illegitimate and its own cultural counterattack must remain repressed, then for these reasons alone and in order to maintain its supposed coherence, these liberals should not vote at election time for the liberal option possibly available. , thus also contradicting a good part of the liberal tradition which refuses the ideological separation between actions and ideas.

The ethics of conviction, typical of science and theory, represents for these liberals the only valid alternative, completely excluding the ethics of responsibility —according to the well-known distinction of Max Weber—, engaged from ideas with the mud of struggle, which in the light of liberalism, understood also as a practical political philosophy, is notoriously dubious.

The lack of interest in the concrete consequences of the liberal retreat in the political sphere is hardly an exercise that certain liberals, admittedly advantaged in other respects, can afford to exercise, who prefer to contemplate the collapse with a false placidity from their turn of ‘ivory. Nor can they validly accuse us, because of what has already been explained, of being utilitarians or finalists, whom we otherwise regard as merely leaning towards the ethics of responsibility as a means for liberal ideas to achieve real political and social influence, before ending up consumed for the expropriation of the statists.

If, as Marty asserts, the Gramscian strategy is a “delusional plan”, that does not necessarily mean that it deserves no response, quite the contrary: the discourse of the so-called “new right”, in which liberalism mingles with reactionary conservatism, in case it proves to be the beginning of an effective political path against the socialist cultural battle, instead of turning away in scandal, liberals must assume the limits of their current forces and at the same time propose the mission to influence as much as possible in this emerging alternative movement on the left, in order to intervene in the retrograde conservative tendencies and also to fight in this space for the predominance of the ideas of freedom.

*Roberto Campos is a lawyer, university professor and parliamentary secretary of La Libertad Avanza in the Legislative Assembly of Buenos Aires.

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