In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s frame turns Reagan inside out. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) talked like the purest liberal individualist in American politics, and on Mearsheimer’s account that talk was the surface of something else: nationalism wearing liberal clothes.
Start with the rhetoric. The city on a hill, the evil empire, the Westminster speech of June 8, 1982 consigning Marxism-Leninism to the ash heap of history. That language is universalist. Rights belong to everyone, freedom is the natural condition of man, and the Soviet system offends against human nature. Pure political liberalism by Mearsheimer’s definition.
Now look at the practice. Reagan governed in a bipolar world, and Mearsheimer argues that bipolarity disciplines states into realism whether they like it or not. Liberal hegemony only became possible after 1989, when the United States faced no peer. Reagan never had that luxury. So his foreign policy looks like containment with a megaphone. He armed proxies in Afghanistan and Nicaragua rather than sending armies to build democracies. He embraced Jeane Kirkpatrick’s (1926-2006) distinction between authoritarian friends and totalitarian enemies, which is realist alliance logic dressed as moral philosophy. He pulled out of Lebanon in 1984 after the barracks bombing rather than escalate for credibility’s sake. He negotiated with Gorbachev (1931-2022) the moment the balance of power made negotiation profitable. A liberal crusader does not sign the INF Treaty with the head of the evil empire. A realist does.
Reagan preached individualism, but nobody experienced Reaganism as atomism. People experienced it as belonging. Morning in America, the flag, the restored pride after Vietnam and the Carter years. Reagan offered Americans membership in a group with a story, and that is why they loved him. The cowboy individualist is an American tribal myth, a marker of group identity. When Reagan celebrated the lone entrepreneur, his audience heard a hymn to us, the Americans, against them. His individualism functioned as a shibboleth of the tribe.
Reagan’s own biography illustrates Mearsheimer’s claim about socialization beating reason. He did not reason his way to his creed. He absorbed it: the Disciples of Christ piety of his mother in Dixon, Illinois, the small-town Midwest of the 1920s, the Hollywood anticommunism of the Screen Actors Guild fights, the General Electric years touring plants and giving the same speech hundreds of times. By the time Reagan held power his values were decades-old infusions, and he held them with the fixity of a man who never doubted what his group taught him. Reason came later, as decoration.
Reagan succeeded because he fused the two ideologies in the order Mearsheimer says they must be ranked. Nationalism first, liberalism second, with liberalism serving as the vocabulary of the nation rather than a program for the planet. The universalist talk gave Americans a flattering self-image. The realist practice kept the costs down. His successors inverted the order after the Cold War, took the universalist talk as a literal program, and produced the failures Mearsheimer’s book catalogs.
