Becca Rothfeld's Dumb Liberalism

'What looks to her like thrilling excess may be rather the desperate emptiness of a liberal life'

I was asked by a publication I’ve written for on other occasions to review Becca Rothfeld’s new book, presumably because they knew I’d be bitchy about it. After going through a couple rounds of apparently enthusiastic edits, the piece has been cancelled (editor says, ‘not my decision’), although at least I did get paid. Of course it’s rather annoying at any time not to be in print, and to have written about a book I otherwise wouldn’t have read, but the essay, even unpublished, was at least an opportunity to think a bit further about the relationship between liberalism, on the one hand, and conceptions about things called aesthetics and ethics on the other—a relationship that I think Rothfeld, like many liberals, badly misunderstands. Here’s the review below:

Three years ago Becca Rothfeld, now book critic for the Washington Post, attacked what she took to be the hegemony of leftist “sanctimony literature,” exemplified by the work of writers like Sally Rooney. She was indirectly expressing her opposition to not only the state of contemporary fiction, but also to the ‘woke’ political moralism sweeping through America’s universities and cultural spaces. Without objecting to any of the substantive goals of the progressive left (indeed, without hardly giving them consideration), Rothfeld insisted that we need a new sort of fiction and a new politics, both more sensitive to the difficulties of putting ideals into practice.

Inspired by Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling, she called for an ethos that “does not fit neatly into the upvote/downvote dichotomy”—or the right/left one. It would have to be modelled, she suggested, by a new generation of cultural critics like herself, who would take up Trilling’s legacy to show us the infinite complexity that must attend—if not precede and indeed thwart—political and moral action. Like many liberals before her, she meant to elevate the contemplation of subjective perplexities to a style of mind and a way of life: “[w]e already have enough politics; now it is time for us to find an ethics… we may still aspire to more good books,” she concluded.

With her new collection of essays, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, Rothfeld gives us, something of an ethics, a putting into practice of her version of liberalism. The result fails even on its own terms.

The introduction to All Things argues that the book’s contents are connected by a common defense of two apparently conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, Rothfeld upholds an “egalitarianism” that respects all people as the bearers of universal human rights who deserve a fair share of society’s material goods. On the other, she espouses a drive called “maximalism” or “nepotism” by which, in our private lives (in matters of aesthetic and romantic taste, for example) we bestow special favor on some people as better than others. The system in which these two opposing principles meet is liberalism, which lets equality reign in public and discrimination organize our private lives. Rothfeld here is reinventing the wheel of political philosophy—liberalism and its critics have been for some two hundred years pointing out that these two principles and their tension are the essence (perhaps the wealth, perhaps the poverty) of our regime.

What is perhaps more peculiar is the way Rothfeld’s book moves among the modes of personal essay (reflections on Rothfeld’s eating disorders), cultural critique (a takedown of Marie Kondo), and engagement with the history of philosophy. One has the impression that Rothfeld’s way of writing each and of braiding them triply together is meant to model the sort of rich inner life, thrumming with exciting tensions, that liberalism protects from such enemies as the shrill political morality of “sanctimony literature.” Her own self-consciousness showcases the virtues of our embattled political tradition, in something like an aesthetic and ethical equivalent of the “Kitchen Debate” in which Nixon traveled to the Soviet Union to show Khruschev the superiority of his country’s household products.

Rothfeld’s liberalism, however, does not have the goods. Her treatment both of intellectual and emotional matters is so self-satisfied that it seems at times to be a deliberate indictment of liberals. As if to reveal how liberal notions about tolerance and the division between private and public lead us inevitably to minimize disagreements as mere differences of “opinion” and thus to trivialize our own ideas and passions, Rothfeld draws on the work of philosophers and the details of her personal history, turning thought and life into mere fodder for rumination with no possible connection to personal or collective action. She misguidedly elevates musing into an ethics of liberalism.

**

Rothfeld makes a misuse of a famous name in an essay in which she describes cyber-stalking her ex’s new girlfriend. She pursues this activity with such a libidinous intensity that it is, she argues, no exaggeration to compare her night-long scrolling through the woman’s Instagram posts to love. To explain her apparently amorous feelings, Rothfeld calls upon the French critic Roland Barthes, who “observes in A Lover’s Discourse [that] love functions perhaps primarily to transfigure senseless surface into symbol,” in an obsessive, crazy-making imperative to find meaning—always relating back to the beloved—everywhere.

Rothfeld apparently doesn’t realize that Barthes’ book—a series of several dozen fragments (indeed the title is Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse) written in an avant-garde literary style—is not an authoritative “monograph on romance,” as she referred to it in her essay’s first iteration that appeared in the Yale Review. Barthes does not make straightforward claims about the nature and function of love; rather, in this work of experimental criticism, he alternately describes and enacts how someone in love might talk about the experience of being in love with someone who does not reciprocate the feeling.  In the mind of “the lover,” Barthes argued, love, necessarily, seems to have the same totalizing, maddening quality for everyone and to be, by its very nature, a doomed enterprise. Without Barthes’ irony, Rothfeld, apparently herself enamored, likewise insists that our attempts to know another person (in this case, by stalking them) cannot succeed. To be in love is to be entranced, she agrees with Barthes’ lover, by dazzling images of the beloved (her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend’s Instagram posts) but unable to connect with the real person.

For all the confessional quality of this essay, Rothfeld seems to lack awareness both of herself as well as of the literary nature of Barthes’ text, which becomes for her a pretext to fatuously universalize about a rather pathetic episode in her personal life, as if we had all been guilty of her sins. Such episodes, of course, can be the stuff of great writing. Barthes himself was inspired by a pitiful, years-long crush on one of his students to begin thinking about love. He came to suspect, however, that the wish to claim decisively what phenomena such as love are really like, absolutely and for everyone, is itself a symptom of obsession, a desperate attempt to intellectualize oneself out of a painful subjective reality. As if to say, “It’s not that I’m a loser; everyone else is a loser, too.”

Rothfeld seems unable to discover irony in works of fiction no less than in works of ‘theory.’ She observes, for instance, that Jane Austen was correct to state that “[g]eneral incivility is indeed the very essence of love,” a point humorously made by the narrator of Pride and Prejudice. The sententious bits of wisdom offered by the novel’s narrator, however, must not be understood to be literal, straightforward claims—a novel, one hates to remind a professional book reviewer, is not a syllogism. The narrator’s famous claim, for example, that a man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, is at once a parody of the folk-wisdom of the busy-body neighbors and husband-seeking women of Austen’s novel, and also, ironically, true, since ultimately, after many adventures and doubts, it does apply to Mr. Darcy.

Spirals of irony and surprise by which statements come to be true in unexpected ways are part of the pleasure of literature, of post-Hegelian philosophy, or just of ordinary conversation. We mock and affirm at once, eluding simple agreement or disagreement, the simplistic “upvote/downvote” reactions that Rothfeld once found to be unfortunately characteristic of both our political and literary discourse. Her mind transforms the subtle comedy of Austen, the ludic performances of Barthes, and the precious specificity of nearly every other author it comes across into small, manageable assertions hardly more complicated than the claims Rothfeld attributed to “sanctimony literature.”

**

Liberals talk about freedom of opinion, but seem to consider themselves to have already answered all the big questions facing humanity with their catechisms of human rights. Liberals debate in their political assemblies about what course of action to take, but the fundamental decisions about what sort of life is worth living and how to have it are left out of politics, consigned to a private realm which, as critics from the right and left have long observed, is actually shaped less by the play of personal values than by the domination of often unnoticed institutions and norms. Indeed, depoliticizing the private realm means, in the eyes of many critics, leaving it exposed to such domination. Rothfeld, however, as her bizarre revelations about her penchant for eroticized stalking suggest, seems unconcerned that the desires that seem most our own and most connected to personal freedom might in fact be forces of subjection from which we would be better rescued. What looks to her like thrilling excess may be rather the desperate emptiness of a liberal life.

Liberalism for Rothfeld, as for many thinkers before her, is a regime that enforces “neutrality” in the public sphere, requiring us to treat fellow citizens as more or less fungible instances of human dignity and to tolerate their particular “values” while pursuing our own in smaller “communities.” As the subtitle of All Things implies, Rothfeld insists that we should follow after our values in a spirit of “interpersonal disproportion,” with “want, glut and extravagance.” Given how many Americans are obese, indebted, benumbed with legalized cannabis, sports-betting, and endless televisual ‘content,’ it would seem that her compatriots hardly need Rothfeld’s encouragement. What she bemoans as the (already passé) faddishness of a certain “minimalism” in interior decoration and literary fiction might be more sympathetically understood as a response to a culture in which over-stuffed and unsatisfying private lives are made to bear the impossible burden of providing cultural resources and orientation that can only ever come from a non-neutral public life oriented by explicit, positive ideals greater than toleration to others and unlimited consumption.

Rothfeld almost recognizes that the liberalism she promotes is decadent and ailing—that it is as unwell as her own cyber-stalking or bingeing M&Ms—when, borrowing from Lacan or Pascal, she argues that the “greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfillment.” What sort of system is liberalism, which seems to give these longings the maximal scope for uninterrupted expression, and what sort of ethics is Rothfeld’s, which encourages us to chase our longings wantonly, if they are doomed to unfulfillment? If people cannot really be satisfied by the sort of gluttonous private life Rothfeld advocates, then perhaps we would be better off under a regime of state-sanctioned stoicism. Or perhaps, in a more Marxist vein, we might ask what political and economic arrangements would make it possible for our greatest longings to be satisfied at last—or what ideological purpose is served by claims that we are all, as human beings, necessarily unable to give our greatest longings earthly expression? Although it must noted that, contra Marx, Rothfeld tends to imagine the most intense desires of humanity to be something like an especially intense orgasm rather than the free play of our creative faculties in a world finally free of alienation.

But one does not need to oppose liberalism to find fault with Rothfeld’s troubled apologia. Although she accepts uncritically the formulation that liberalism is about “neutrality” towards alternative values in the public realm, and the exuberant pursuit of those values in private, many defenders of liberalism have recognized that this seems to require individuals to never be serious about the values around which they seem to organize their lives. Seriousness, real commitment to an idea, seems rather to demand our enacting it in the world, and entering into conflict with people who want to enact opposing ideas. How to promote tolerance for diverse points of view without also promoting the sort of unseriousness that leads to moral decline appears to serious liberals as a serious problem, one that deserves to be rethought beyond the division between public and private, a broad neutral realm of generalized toleration and smaller intimate spheres of preference, excess and compulsion.

Ethics, by these lights, referring as it does not to the domain of general moral precepts but to their difficult application within a particular life, might name the difficulty of this rethinking, rather than, as it does for Rothfeld, a kind of fetish enchanting our ‘private’ life in compensation for our incapacity for collective action or the fulfillment of humanity’s most fundamental aspirations. Rothfeld holds that liberalism will stand or fall on what she takes to be the problem of ethics, characterized by a perhaps insuperable friction between opposing, legitimate demands (equality vs. difference, public vs. private, neutrality vs. passion). If the fate of liberalism depends on the ability of ordinary citizens, or cultured elites, to hold contradictory views with energy and grace, then ours must be a particularly vulnerable sort of social arrangement. If the fate of liberalism depends on the particular sort of ethics practiced by Rothfeld it is—like her attempts to know another person by scrutinizing her Instagram—simply doomed. Liberalism, as a regime constituted by multiple principles that must be held in productive tension, demands an ethics of irony and self-restraint, resistant to the demands of wanton desire, the indiscipline of sloppy thinking, and the facile dismissal of politics. Liberals should read Rothfeld’s essays as cautionary tales.