Our age is one defined by history, yet without precedent. Rapid technological advancement as well as a globalizing concept of society point towards the inevitable triumph of liberalism, an ideology just as much as it is an evolutionary process. Meanwhile, as the contemporary world order remains stagnant and obstinate to liberal progress, a unique and ahistorical tension has given rise to a new wave of illiberalism which threatens to destroy all progress and return us a hundred years into the past.
A year ago, the U.S. first came to reconcile itself with what had seemed the impossible — President Donald J. Trump. While tremors of White ethno-nationalism and imperial revanchism were apparent, defenders of the liberal order failed to comprehend the true violence of the coming storm and the weakness that had arisen within our system. He is the final, farcical rendition of America’s gridlocked system.
What is to come after Mr. Trump is a paramount concern of The New Dial. So too is the question of bedrock principles of liberal democracy. In his ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’ (1967), Professor Noam A. Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote about the rise of the new technician-expert-scholar of liberal, capitalistic democracy; as opposed to the free-wheeling intellectuals that only so long ago roamed the world in search of wisdom. While The New Dial does not hold Prof. Chomsky’s skepticism of liberal democracy, it does recognize the distinction between modern scholarship, conceived within the bounds of the current system, and the presumptions that it makes.
We hope to explore them both. The New Dial is a liberal publication, insofar as liberalism is in its essence the theory and practice of reason, tolerance, justice, and liberty. We hope through commentary and journalism to explore the roots of philosophical liberalism, as well as to address the contemporary machinery of liberalism in all of its virtues and vices.
Thus we devote ourselves as editors to its cause.
HENRY BARTMAN
SAM HARSHBARGER
CHRISTIAN MARTIN
MICHAEL MEYER