Weekend Essay – Modern liberalism destroys liberty
Something important happened on Thursday evening. After appearing on BBC Question Time, Claire Fox, former MEP and Director of the Academy of Ideas, defined in the concise honesty of a frustrated tweet the crisis of modern liberalism.
Summarising the behaviour of her fellow panellist, Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Abingdon and Oxford West, Fox said: “if Layla is (the) face of liberalism, it is screwed. Her mean-spirited, hectoring approach to her opponents while being incredibly self-satisfied, is pretty unendearing. Her illiberalism brandished with pride.”
This captures the essence of how self-identifying liberals everywhere, not just in Britain, have begun turning their backs upon the principles for which classical liberals used to strive: individual liberty, a toleration of difference, a respect for human dignity, a scepticism towards authority and orthodoxy, a humility in the face of the great challenges of statecraft.
Instead, the UK’s Liberal Democrats have become the populist party of the Remain movement. In 2019, they sought to counteract the result of the largest democratic exercise in British history by revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit, a policy which would have disempowered millions of voters and done untold harm to confidence in the institutions of government in this country.
They did so in order to take power away from people and towards an unelected body operating in the institutions of the European Union. In so doing, they chose technocracy above democracy, became dogmatic champions of orthodoxy, and elevated political authority above political consent. They have achieved all of this while believing, sincerely, that they are the torchbearers of liberalism.
The “liberal” wing of the Democratic Party in the United States – the distant cousins of the Corbyn movement – have their own illiberal fixations. They have come to champion the cause of the “climate emergency”, simultaneously reinventing the language of class struggle while berating working class voters who are worried about their livelihoods. And they have ramped up the rhetoric of racial struggle, depicting their cause as that of justice and equality and their opponents as pandering to racists, “deplorables”, and white supremacists.
Hectoring, intolerant, self-satisfied, and all the while utterly convinced of their own moral righteousness. In the end, the overwhelming majority of African-American voters who opted for the moderate Joe Biden in last Tuesday’s primaries clearly disagreed with their polarising diagnosis. History’s humour, irony, tends to happen upon those who believe they are the arbiters of human progress.
Anglo-American liberals have become dangerously unhinged. And while many of them continue to call themselves liberals, their politics have become markedly illiberal. Their behaviour and their principles have very little to do with liberty. They have, in other words, taken the liberty out of liberalism.
This is why recapturing the meaning of liberalism in its classical sense has never been more important than it is today. In fact, it is more pressing than ever to ask the question: what defines Anglo-American liberalism, why did it triumph, and how did it lose its way?
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What is liberalism? It is, first and foremost, a philosophy that believes in the importance of individuals, their liberty, and their personal freedoms. This is embedded in liberalism’s linguistic roots – the word liber in Latin can be used as an adjective to mean “free”, or as a noun to signify a free person. In its political thought, liberalism is characterised by an approach to government that seeks to reconcile competing interests in society by striking a balance between the authority of the state and the rights of the individual.
The starting point of liberalism is that individuals and groups have differing and competing interests, and that a political settlement that allows for these views to be freely exchanged is the best way to achieve enduring social stability. Consequently, it is preoccupied with the processes of legislating as much as it is with protecting liberty, and it is concerned about cultivating the vitality of civil society as much as it is with promoting the rule of law.
In the words of Edmund Fawcett, it is above all “a modern practice of politics” guided by “four broad ideas”. Among them are two attitudes to civil society: “acknowledgement of inescapable ethical and material conflict in society” combined with “a respect for people whatever they think and whoever they are”. To these, Fawcett adds a “distrust of power” and a “faith in human progress”. It is, first and foremost, a political creed rather than a narrowly economic one; and it is more a governing mentality than a strict ideology.
Liberalism enjoys a long pre-history and has rich groundings both in the neo-Roman political theory of the Renaissance and traditions of religious individualism. Quentin Skinner and Larry Siedentop, in different ways, have charted accounts of “Liberty before Liberalism”, crafting liberal genealogies descended from Christian moral theology as well as the defences of civil equality and political self-government in seventeenth-century England.
The origins of philosophical liberalism can also be found in the painful experience of the religious wars and sectarian intolerance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It owes much to the pen of philosophers such as John Locke, who sought to craft a place for freedom of religion and the “erring conscience”, however circumscribed.
In addition, Locke fashioned a contractarian theory of government in which power is ultimately drawn from the people, and authority and legitimacy are bestowed by consent rather than imposed through coercion and the “bending of the will”. This contractarianism would enjoy a long career – the American revolutionaries were avid readers of Locke’s account of government. So, too, were several generations of English Whigs, the loose group in parliament that preceded the emergence of Britain’s first liberal political party (the Whig-Liberals) in the mid-nineteenth century.
As a modern political practice, however, liberalism was truly forged in the torturous, divisive aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789 and the age of Industrial Revolution that gathered pace in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Liberalism in its classical manifestation was grounded in the belief that political reform and the free exchange of ideas are the best ways of managing the competing demands and diverse elements called into existence by a complex modern society undergoing transformation.
“If nineteenth-century Liberalism meant anything,” Jonathan Parry writes “it meant a political system in which a large number of potentially incompatible interests – whether nationality, classes, or sects – were mature enough to accept an over-arching code of law which guaranteed each a wide variety of liberties. To accept the rule of law in this way was to demonstrate character, fitness for citizenship.”
Amid chaos and uncertainty, liberal governments sought to create stability. Where there was discord, they sought to bring harmony. One of 19th century liberalism’s foremost practitioners, Prime Minister William Gladstone, said in 1885 that “Liberalism has ever sought to united freedom of individual thought and action…with corporate efficiency” – that is, to bring together the liberty of the individual with a harmonious civil community. As Fawcett has emphasised, “Liberalism from its birth was as much a search for order as a pursuit of liberty.”
Liberalism is anti-authority in the sense that liberals believe, as far as is practically possible, that individuals need to be empowered to make their own economic and lifestyle choices. This distinguishes liberalism markedly from statist socialism. Yet it is pro-government when it comes to enforcing the rule of law and ensuring that political equality and meritocracy prevail. It is activist, even forceful, when curbing threats to the foundations of civil society or redressing grave inequalities in economic conditions. That is what separates it from strict libertarianism.
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There are many branches to the tree of liberalism and liberal politics have always been a broad church. Where some liberals believe that the greatest threat to liberty is an over powerful state disrupting free markets and damaging trade, others envisage a more active role for central authority in breaking up odious monopolies, dissolving complacent cronyism, and redistributing power.
Liberal government is not uniform – at its best, it is attentive to the needs of a particular time and place. In the nineteenth century, liberals in Britain such as Gladstone, affectionately called the “People’s William”, considered it a moral crusade to minimise the state under the rallying cry of “liberty, retrenchment, reform”. In 1909, the Liberal Chancellor and future Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, introduced the “People’s Budget” that laid the foundations of the British Welfare State.
At the same time, Anglo-American liberals, alongside others, gradually expanded the rights of the civil community. In the United States, evangelical abolitionists, liberal Republicans, northern Democrats rallied with those whom we would now call libertarians for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery. Figures such as the African-American former slave, abolitionist and political liberal Frederick Douglas, fought in a long struggle for civil rights, which was finally completed under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democrat administration in 1968.
In the twentieth century, liberal giants on both sides of the Atlantic led their countries into the epic ideological conflicts and great military battles of the twentieth century – and emerged triumphant. The Conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill, who began his political career as a Liberal MP, commanded Britain’s resistance against the right wing, racialised collectivism imposed by National Socialism on the European continent. The architect of the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, expanded the social and economic role of the state during the depths of the Great Depression and led the free world in the fight against fascism before he died in office in April 1945.
Later in the same century, two unorthodox liberals spearheaded the “free market revival” of the 1980s, renewing confidence in the West and paving the way for the victory of liberal democracy over communism at the end of the Cold War. The Conservative Margaret Thatcher, a Methodist radical and ethical individualist, and the Republican Ronald Reagan, a lifelong admirer of Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism, promoted personal freedom both at home and abroad. The vindication of their governing philosophies came when the Berlin wall came crashing down in 1989.
To tell this story is not ignore the personal flaws of individual liberals or the contradictions and failings within their politics. Nor is it to indulge in any whiggish sense of progress. It is instead to remark upon the extraordinary achievements of liberal statesmanship. Liberalism is an ongoing project, a work in progress rather than a timeless revelation, and its faults necessarily reflect human imperfections.
For all its diversity across time and place, classical liberalism is about liberty and empowering the individual. Government, in the liberal mode of politics, is the challenge of balancing the diverse, competing interests of society without lapsing into coercive authoritarianism or the oppressive domination of one group over another. Individual dignity is protected and personal agency is empowered by free conscience, free speech, and free choice. This is the liberal attitude to power and society that brought down walls and elevated the promise of freedom in the winter of 1989.
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The liberal values that seemed to have been triumphant in the West increasingly find themselves under siege today. There is also something unsettling about the trajectory of some strands of modern liberalism that have emerged since the end of the Cold War. Two particular tendencies stand out as prominent forms of what the political philosopher John Gray calls “hyper-liberalism”. That is, they are liberalisms that have become radically detached from the classical base.
One of these strands is the liberal-left “progressivist” form of social liberalism, which is often derided as “wokeness”. This is the liberalism of the affluent urban graduate class, with hubs in the cities of London and New York and in the lecture halls of universities. When it is broken down, this progressivism is at heart a vague form of leftism reinforced by post-modern cultural relativism. It is Marxist in its political economy and post-colonial in its view of history.
Politically, it finds its manifestation in what is often called “the liberal-left” – it is represented in the UK by the Corbyn project, and in the US by the self-proclaimed “liberal” wing of the Democratic Party, which includes figures such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It combines an anti-Western geopolitical imagination with a domestic vision animated by class conflict and, increasingly, climate struggle.
What is most disturbing about progressivist liberalism is its totalitarian approach to freedom of speech. Across academies in the US and the UK, the proponents of this strand of liberalism indulge in no-platforming, boycotting lecturers with whom they disagree, and silencing debate using the speech codes of political correctness.
To call this liberalism, truthfully-speaking, is to indulge in a misnomer. Its proponents are not individualists – they are collectivists and communitarians. And the imprint of this can be seen in the way in which US liberals will often talk about “the black vote” as an homogenous bloc. Yet, as one African-American voter, KJ Kearney, recently told the BBC, “When I hear people talk about the black vote what I hear is a loss of individuality. I hear someone who is stereotyping. Black is not a monolith.” The entire point of civil rights, after all, is that they are held not by corporate guilds or “communities” but by individual persons.
In excessively pursuing identity politics, progressivist liberalism has abandoned the liberty of the individual. In seeking to insulate imagined communities from being wounded by words, they have frequently anaesthetised the free exchange of ideas. Instead, they have created codes for the regulation of discourse, forgetting that the greatest minority of all, in the end, is neither a cast, nor a creed, nor a faith, but the dissenting individual.
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There is another tendency in post-Cold War liberalism that is less socially radical but equally utopian in character. It equates liberalism with globalisation and sees the universal in the supranational. This is the liberalism of Davos Man. Its worldview is informed by a belief in the virtue of global institutions as enlightened managers of progress.
It is a technocratic, metropolitan brand. It believes that improvement is a linear process defined by breaking down the borders that divide markets in order to drive the integration of goods, services, and labour and to power economic growth and development. It has a fundamentally de-politicised vision of politics. According to its dictates, the job of government essentially becomes one of economic management.
It is this utopian faith in a post-political, technocratic future that leads proponents of this type of liberalism into expressing a disdain for the inconveniences of democracy. It becomes what Yascha Mounck refers to as “undemocratic liberalism” , the mirror image of the “illiberal democracy” being advanced by the contemporary populist right. As Vernon Bogdanor has noted, “Many liberals have become elitists, berating the voters for using their democratic rights.”
The anti-democratic impulse is exemplified by figures such as Jason Brennan, an American political scientist who believes that a “competence principle” must be a prerequisite for voting rights. For Brennan, “political decisions are presumed to be unjust if they are made incompetently or in bad faith, or by a generally incompetent decision-making body”. In order to save liberal democracy, the argument goes, the electorate must be replaced with a selectorate committed to an enlightened consensus.
This type of mentality swayed the minds of the UK’s Liberal Democrats, for whom the result of the UK’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union was an unpalatable outcome. In this way, they – and their continental allies such as Guy Verhofstadt – have become the inheritors of a new intellectual orthodoxy prominent in the EU and its institutions, one which holds that the European project is too important to be held in check by the power of democratic mandates.
The origins of this anti-democratic turn were captured well in the remarks of Jean Rey, the ex-President of the European Commission, in 1974. Ahead of the UK’s 1975 referendum on membership of the European Economic Community, he said:
“A referendum on this matter consists of consulting people who don’t know the problems instead of consulting people who know them. I would deplore a situation in which the policy of this great country should be left to housewives. It should be decided instead by trained and informed people.”
Such attitudes represent a revival of the scepticism towards fully-fledged democracy that characterised much of 19th century liberal politics. This was a scepticism – if not always an outright hostility – motivated by the fear that democratic government must necessarily descend into the rule of the mob or the tyranny of the majority. Such sentiments have been given a new lease of life by embittered European liberals who have seen democratic votes contradict their visions of modernity.
Ultimately, this type of liberalism has come to stand in the eyes of many for unbridled globalisation with a callous regard to its human consequences. The forces of the global market, eroding national sovereignty and elevating universal rules and values, are viewed as being akin to a necessity written into the laws of history. They become an engine of enlightenment, an antidote to parochialism, a driving force for progress.
The logic of this position is that people and states must accommodate themselves to the rules of supranational organisations – surrendering their sovereignty and democratic voting rights in the process – in order to allow the engines of progress to operate. In this way, globalism has become a secular theodicy.
And in its own way, this impulse is no less materialist than its arch-nemesis and alter idem, statist socialism – both the globalist and the socialist believe that underlying material laws and conditions are the determinants of human history. Where one surrenders authority to an all-powerful central state, the other subjects itself to an omniscient managerial class. Both of these paths to hyper-liberalism necessitate the creation of a command-and-control bureaucracy.
Pushed to its extreme, the globalist’s desire to de-politicise politics takes from people the very power to make choices that affect their own lives. It instead conceives of global economic forces as the locomotives of history. Yet, and this is the great irony, while claiming to function managerially, globalist institutions such as the EU and the IMF in reality often serve to structure administration and markets for their own political – or geopolitical – purposes.
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The two tendencies outlined here often overlap in particular individuals and political movements– they are impulses, not hard and fast categorisations. And yet they also exhibit some fundamentally similar tendencies. They offer a modern parable of how progressive ideals can displace the individual, and how political utopianism paves the high road to intolerance.
The globalist and progressivist tendencies are both – in one way or another – terrible warnings about how a faith in one particular vision human progress can become an overriding obsession and moral imperative. They have, in their own ways, brought seething to the surface the intolerant and authoritarian strands that can emerge when liberalism becomes detached from a conservative defence of individual liberty.
When taken together these divergent strands of modern liberalism have a common fatal flaw: they are fundamentally disempowering. Neither provides a coherent, morally fulfilling, and compelling account of the individual and human nature as they interact with a contingent, complex world. They are void of meaningful explorations of how the liberty of the individual can be advanced, preserved, and protected. Theirs is a liberalism stripped of humanism.
At the same time, they are intensely legalistic, albeit in different ways. In the case of progressivist social liberalism, the classical defence of the right to freedom of speech and expression has been displaced by rules policing speech and expression. In the case of globalist economic liberalism, the sacred pillars of national self-determination and representative government have been sacrificed at the altar of the irresistible laws of globalisation. In both cases, freedom has been squeezed out of the picture. Globalism and progressivism are no longer defined by the defence of liberty.
In moving away from the core civil and political roots of the liberal tradition, progressivists and globalists have forged new political ideologies that have hollowed liberalism of its humane elements and its realism. Their politics have taken on a powerfully – and dangerously – utopian tone that abandons the liberal approach to government as an ongoing, and interminable, conversation between and reconciliation of competing interests.
In short, they have become hyper-liberals, but they could also be called metaphysical liberals – their attachment to abstract ideology has trumped their commitment to politics as the art of the possible. Extolling the universal, they have lost that morality which often resides in the beauty of particular actions, and in the love of people rather than principles. Rather than working with the grains of human nature, they have attempted to impose a vision of what they wish it to be.
Hyper-liberals have taken the liberty out of liberalism. They have stripped it of its essential character and created something other. Liberalism has, quite literally, become unhinged.
In other words, will it soon be time to begin writing the history of “Liberty after Liberalism”?