Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
„The Dark Knight", the second part of Christopher Nolan's legendary Batman trilogy, tells not only the story of the Joker but also that of Harvey Dent. The sunny-boy district attorney with maximum idealism wants to free corrupt Gotham City from the grip of crime and corruption.
But the Joker breaks him: he has Dent’s partner blown up and, shortly after, makes clear to the traumatised Dent where the real guilt for her death is to be found: in the incapable, disorganised, soft, compromising, and therefore compromised political system of Gotham.
With the growing systemic pressure on the liberal democracies of the West, the number of liberals with the Harvey Dent syndrome has been rising for some time. They are people who started out with high ideals. The companions of their youth were Mises and Friedman. Ludwig Erhard and Margaret Thatcher made their eyes light up. The end of history breathed unconsciously in them, and the faith in progress put a spring in their step. They were self-confident sunny boys (girls are unfortunately generally rare in this milieu), who fretted over Greek sovereign debt, expansive central-bank policy, or anti-founder regulation. They were convinced: if they joined a party, put their thoughts in blogs, organised a student group, or at least wore T-shirts with the right messages, something would change. No, not just change: they! They themselves would change something.
But these expectations ran into the void: out of the reform jam of Western states grew something that felt like the impenetrable fatbergs that clog urban sewers. Willingness to perform fell ever more into disrepute, while claims to performance were honoured without limit. The system of Western societies, sclerotic both demographically and politico-bureaucratically, was put under chronic stress by irregular migration. Progress suffocated in mildew. And the seemingly ended history awoke in panic from its sleeping-beauty slumber and coughed up populisms of every colour.
Photo by Patrick Collins on Unsplash
Hopes and expectations about the course of things, and especially about oneself, shattered. Had one not had the right insights? Had one not gone at it with verve, in the local party chapter, on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? And nothing got better, everything worse. How wearing it is to watch such developments; how wearing especially when one was convinced one could halt and reverse them by one’s own effort. One had had the right ideas. One had given everything.
Christopher Nolan had only a few shots in „The Dark Knight” to sketch Harvey Dent’s transformation into the arch-villain Two-Face. In the reality of the first quarter of the 21st century, the darkening of liberal sunny boys has gone somewhat more slowly, though by now at increasing speed.
The helplessness, the loss of self-efficacy, triggers the Harvey Dent syndrome: liberals work themselves into frustration. Their initial will for change becomes more and more a will for destruction. (They love the chainsaw not because it makes room for new growth, but because it minces up the hated old.) In their exhaustion they become more and more open to one of the two great temptations with which the anti-liberal seducer, the „Joker”, tries to lead the faithful from the right path.
The two great temptations are hubris and rage. They mirror the two great superpowers of liberalism: humility and courage.
In becoming liberal, liberals work their way into humility as a basic attitude toward fellow human beings and toward the world around them: they learn to recognise that the other may have insights at least as good as one’s own; that the other can take her life in hand at least as successfully as I do mine. And starting from this trust in responsibility, and in defiance of life’s uncertainties, liberals are again and again willing to take the step into the unknown, the unplannable, the uncontrollable. Courage is the rhythm of their life.
Against these virtues stand the temptations: the counterpart to humility is hubris, that form of intellectual egoism that trusts reason a great deal, but (often while shaking the head at the political realm) above all, or exclusively, one’s own reason. The look at (depending on inclination) Merz or Trump, Orbán or Macron, which lets the certainty grow that, over there, only stupidity or malice rages.
And against courage stands rage. The entrepreneurial energy deeply rooted in the liberal character turns away from building, out of frustration, and loses sight of the goal: the building-into of the realm of the infinite possibilities of still uncharted territories of world and human being. The energy becomes blind and angry. It no longer feeds on hope for tomorrow, but on disappointment and grief about today. The raging liberal wants to see things burn: that which is closed to his arguments, which sweeps his clever proposals aside, which walks open-eyed into its own ruin and pulls everyone along with it.
While this temptation of rage redirects the liberal’s energy toward the destructive, it also takes him off the liberal path by turning him into a politicised creature. Into his thoughts and his heart creeps the primacy of politics. Yet the goal of liberals is, properly, the overcoming of the political. The liberal longs for a world in which people busy themselves with all the many things that make life nicer and more interesting; in which they look at what binds them to one another. A world in which one spends time with family and friends. In which one tinkers and does research. In which one develops new products and services to make life in this world easier, more exciting, and happier. In which one makes music and celebrates, develops new series and games, creates dishes, builds beautiful houses, lays out parks.
From all of that, from the beautiful and the good, from the with-each-other and the for-each-other, the raging turn away. More and more they let themselves be driven by their rage; they are no longer their own master, because every LinkedIn post, every push notification, every podcast episode pulls them back into the realm of the political with force. Each of these sparks triggers the memory of disappointment and frustration. Had one not had the better insights? Had one not given everything?
And the greatest tragedy in this development: this temptation increasingly takes hold not only of the disappointed at midlife. They act as multiplier role models and infect succeeding generations of liberals. Like an inherited family trauma, the easily triggered rage-temptation propagates itself and turns more and more liberals, their energy, their brains, and their hearts, away from striving for the post-political world in which people no longer wall themselves off in camps against each other but work together on a happier tomorrow, as entrepreneurs, artists, researchers, carers, or teachers.
Harvey Dent, after his frustration, became the arch-villain Two-Face, who saw the whole world through a dualistic logic. That is also the logic of the political: the logic of losing and winning, of friend and foe, good and evil, and the limited pie. The logic of the liberal, by contrast, is not dualistic but pluralistic. It is the logic of the market, of experiments, of win-win, of cooperation, and of varied abundance. A liberalism that wants to survive, grow, and attract should rediscover and reawaken this logic. It has to channel its energy into courage rather than rage. It must not let itself be lured into the trap of the worst of all villains, the wholly destructive Joker.
A liberalism with strength for the future is like the great searchlight with which Batman is called: it does not focus on the problems and misery of today, but shines into the sky and so points already toward tomorrow. It shines toward the moment when, at the end of the third part, Batman can disappear from the picture and Gotham City stands on its own feet, to be again what cities should be: a place where people meet each other, work together, learn, create, celebrate, hope, and love.
