Illiberal Liberalism
Illiberal Liberalism
Progressives who advocate for illiberal policies aren't Marxists or postmodernists. They turn liberalism's tools against itself.
“Why Liberalism” is a new series by Persuasion in collaboration with the Institute for Humane Studies. Last week, Emily Chamlee-Wright wrote about the fallacies of the postliberal right. This week, Joseph Heath explores how the tactics of the illiberal left short-circuit classic liberal arguments.
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One of the weirdest things about the current political environment is that so many people whose values are clearly grounded in the liberal tradition have adopted strategies to advance these values that are, one is inclined to say, self-evidently illiberal. Everyone should by now be familiar with tales of the YIPs (“young, illiberal progressives”) who want to ban all fascists from social media, but also think that most of the modern Republican Party is “literally fascist.”
Anyone who has interacted with these young crusaders has also likely noticed that they are untroubled by the apparent contradiction between their professed values and their political methods. While championing the cause of various vulnerable minorities, they are surprisingly willing to employ bullying tactics, attempting to cancel or punish all those who disagree with them. On a strictly tactical level, this seems like an obvious miscalculation. But what I find more interesting is the internal tension within this complex of political attitudes and how it gets managed.
My claim is that they manage this tension by taking advantage of a set of ambiguities, or loopholes, in traditional liberal doctrine, which have the effect of neutralizing the underlying contradiction between their values and tactics. This results in a political stance that I refer to as “illiberal liberalism.” While they may be violating the spirit of liberal toleration, they are not violating the letter of it, and so they have difficulty seeing any problem in their views.
Of course not all of the people that I refer to as “illiberal liberals” think of themselves as liberal, so I should start by saying something about this term. While the way that I’m using it is standard in political philosophy, it doesn’t correspond precisely to how it gets used in public debate. In the philosophical sense, a liberal is one who believes that there should be limits on state power, and thus limits on the power of majorities to impose their will on minorities. Those on the political right who believe the government should have no power to regulate private gun ownership are espousing a liberal position, just as those on the left who think that the state should have no power to limit women’s access to abortion are espousing a liberal position.
In both cases, the liberalism consists in drawing a distinction between one’s private moral views, about how others should behave, from one’s political views, about what we can reasonably force others to do. The basic formula for liberal toleration is extremely simple. Like everyone else, you think that your way of life is right and that others have it wrong. But at the same time, you recognize that others think that their way of life is right and yours is wrong. Based on this realization, you agree to refrain from trying to impose your way of life on others, and in return they agree to refrain from imposing their way of life on you. Use of coercive power by the state is therefore restricted to cases in which everyone can agree that some form of behavior is unacceptable.
Liberal toleration was initially adopted to stop Christians from fighting with one another, but over time it proved quite successful at resolving a wide range of social conflicts. It is both cognitively and emotionally demanding, however, because it requires individuals to separate their moral disapproval of other people’s behavior from their desire to prohibit or punish them for doing it. For example, there is no contradiction in one’s believing that having an abortion is unethical but also that it should be legal (hence the old liberal formula that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”). Similarly, the decriminalization of homosexuality in the late 20th century was a triumph of liberalism, because during the time that these reforms were initiated (in the 1960s), over 70% of the American population considered homosexual relations to be morally wrong.
Maintaining a stance of liberal toleration involves rejecting what John Stuart Mill called the “logic of persecutors.” Everyone is tempted to believe that the situation is completely different when they try to impose their views on others than it is when others try to impose their views on them. Why is it so different? Because I’m right and they’re wrong. That is the fundamentally illiberal thought. Getting to liberalism involves the additional realization that they think they’re right and I’m wrong, and so maybe it’s best to keep the state out of it.
Anyone who’s been paying attention will have noticed, however, that I skated over a pretty major difficulty a few paragraphs back, when I said that state power should be limited to cases where everyone can agree that some behavior is unacceptable. Empirically, this sort of agreement is difficult to find. There are probably death cultists somewhere who have different views than most of us about the desirability of ritualized murder, but we do not want the presence of such groups to block the legal prohibition of killing. We cannot “agree to disagree” about everything.
Because of this, every liberal theory must have some way of delimiting the zone of reasonable disagreement (where we let people do what they want) from that of unreasonable disagreement (where we permit state coercion, essentially ignoring whatever complaints some people may have). This is obviously going to be a very tricky undertaking, and so it is no surprise that a lot of the nitty-gritty of liberal political philosophy involves debating different ways of tracing the boundary.
So where do YIPs come into the story? One popular explanation for their emergence amounts to an academic “lab leak” theory, claiming that woke ideas are a byproduct of seditious doctrines that have been taught in humanities departments, such as postmodernism and Marxism, infecting the minds of the young. There is some truth to this, but proponents of the view have been fingering the wrong suspects. It is actually liberal thinkers in the academy who concocted the most dangerous arguments, not nakedly illiberal theorists like Michel Foucault or Antonio Gramsci.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent much time in an American university in the past few decades. Contrary to the accusation of rampant cultural Marxism, if you look at the big departments like law, political science, and philosophy, it’s wall-to-wall liberalism. These liberals accept certain ground rules on political argumentation, including constraints on the exercise of state power in the pursuit of purely moral objectives. Yet at the same time, they are human, and so naturally bridle at these self-imposed restrictions, often searching for clever ways to circumvent them. Because of this, liberal academics have gotten really good at gerrymandering the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, so that any opposition to their preferred moral views gets categorized as unreasonable (and therefore as “crossing the line,” making it eligible for prohibition).
Probably the best-known examples of this arose from the debates over pornography that occupied a great deal of attention among academics in the 1980s and ‘90s. The development of video recording and playback had led to an increase in the availability of pornography, which in turn generated renewed debate over whether it should be censored (or its distribution restricted). Many feminists were morally offended by the content of a great deal of pornography, and yet most were also unwilling to move directly from the claim that “I am morally offended by x” to the conclusion that “x should be illegal” (because they knew that social conservatives had been using the exact same argument to defend the legal prohibition of homosexuality).
Because of this, an enormous amount of ingenuity was invested in the task of developing arguments for the censorship of pornography that were not just an expression of the moral revulsion experienced by certain viewers. The centerpiece of this effort involved an attempt to show that pornography generated harms, either in its production or consumption, and therefore fell within the domain of state regulation. Appealing to its harmful effects provided a liberal argument for censorship that could not be confused with the illiberal arguments being used by social conservatives. Although most of these harms were rather speculative, a lot of people were happy to overlook problems in this step of the argument, because they strongly approved of the conclusion. This type of argument is what eventually escaped from the lab and has been contaminating the minds of the young.
Think of these as clever symmetry-breaking arguments, aimed at explaining why everyone else has to tolerate you, but you do not have to tolerate anyone else. Rather than just pulling out the old “because I’m right and you’re wrong” claim, these more sophisticated arguments endorse the general principle of toleration, but then supplement it with a special story that explains why it does not apply to one’s own view. Depending on the circumstances, this story can take several different forms:
1. An expansive conception of harm. Suppose you see someone doing something that you consider highly offensive. Your first impulse is to call on others to help you stop that person from doing it. At the same time, you recognize that not everyone finds it quite so offensive, and so you’re going to need a better argument for why it should be stopped than just “it offends me.” An obvious way to bolster your case would be to show that it is in some way harmful—and if you can’t find a genuine harm, make one up.
This is something that social conservatives figured out in the debates over decriminalizing homosexuality. The crudest version of the strategy is to claim that the mental anguish and distress that you experience from witnessing the behavior constitutes a harm. But this isn’t a great argument, as many people pointed out, because the only reason you find it so upsetting is because it offends you, so the fact that you’re upset shouldn’t really count as an additional consideration. The more sophisticated strategy, therefore, is to medicalize the description and say that it harms your mental health, or that it triggers your PTSD. This makes it seem more objective and out-of-your-control, generating an all-purpose harm that can be used as a liberal-sounding argument against practically anything that offends you.
Another very common strategy is not to make up a harm, but rather to draw a probabilistic connection between the behavior that offends you and the incidence of some behavior that is uncontroversially harmful, then claim that the first causes (or promotes) the second. This was again the primary argument in the old debates over pornography, where it was claimed that consumption of pornography increased the incidence of rape (e.g. by contributing to “rape culture”). Structurally, this argument is similar to the claim that violent video games should be banned because they promote school shootings. Both arguments are subject to the usual difficulties around establishing causation, but, more importantly, they are overly broad. Sexually transmitted diseases are also bad, but we don’t want to start banning all forms of behavior or communication that probabilistically increase their incidence.
A particularly cynical version of this argument, which has become popular in recent years, is to point to the elevated suicide rate among some oppressed group, then claim that anyone who criticizes, or even argues with, members of that group is harming them, by (again, probabilistically) increasing that suicide rate. (I say this argument is cynical because men in the U.S. have a suicide rate four times higher than women, just as whites have a suicide rate three times higher than blacks, and yet no one who makes this sort of an argument thinks that we should all be extra-deferential to the feelings of white men, lest they go and kill themselves.)
This is why YIPs are always claiming that they feel unsafe. Indeed, citing “safety concerns” has become the signature move of illiberal liberals. It’s not because they were raised by helicopter parents. It’s because they know that saying “this offends me” is not going to galvanize others to action, but saying “this makes me feel unsafe” will be taken more seriously, because it sounds like they’re being threatened, which is a genuine harm. Some of them may actually be that fragile, but most of them are like soccer players taking a dive, trying to draw a penalty.
2. An expansive conception of rights. Another common way to trace the boundary between the private sphere and the domain of legitimate state intervention is in terms of rights. As long as you’re operating within the sphere of individual rights, the argument goes, then you can do whatever you like, and others will have to tolerate your behavior. It is also commonly believed, however, that the rights of one person end where the rights of others begin (or as the American folk saying has it, “Your right to swing your arms ends where the other man’s nose begins”). Because of this, a good way to limit the freedom of others is to define your own rights as expansively as possible (“the bigger your nose, the less room others have to swing”).
This sort of “rights creep” has been going on for a long time, because many political constituencies find it an attractive way of framing their demands, and so traditional goods, such as housing, or entitlements, such as education, have been redescribed as “rights” in order to lend greater urgency to demands for their provision. At the United Nations level, the term “human rights” is used in a way that bears practically no relation to the traditional liberal concept of a “right” (according to which, violations constitute an illegitimate use of state power). But just as this expansive rights language can be used to press political demands, it can also be used to squeeze out liberal tolerance. Even though living in a liberal society means that you must tolerate a lot of things you disapprove of, the one thing you don’t have to tolerate is other people violating your rights! It stands to reason, therefore, that the more rights you have, the less you need to tolerate.
It’s not difficult to see how this line of thinking can be abused. Consider, for example, the acrimonious debates that occurred over reforms to the sex education curriculum in Ontario public schools. The government initially tried to defuse opposition by declaring some portions of the curriculum mandatory and others optional (with parents/students permitted to skip the optional portions without penalty). Discussion of issues pertaining to “fundamental rights” (such as consent) were put on the mandatory side of things, whereas more contentious material, such as the treatment of gender identity, were categorized as optional. This didn’t really work, because advocates for the various contentious positions immediately reframed all of their claims as involving questions of fundamental rights. This included the now-familiar argument, made by those who believe that gender should be determined through self-identification, that anyone who challenges this claim is denying the “right to exist” of a certain segment of the trans community. (This is a particularly callow bit of word-play, since it sounds as though their “right to life” is being questioned, when in fact it is only their self-description that is being challenged.) The United Nations Human Rights Council even decided to weigh in, unhelpfully, with a document that attributed an astonishing number of rights to students and teachers (while simultaneously ignoring all rights of parents).
3. A narrow conception of voluntariness. One of the freedoms that liberal societies afford their members is freedom of association, which allows individuals not just to pursue their own way of life, but to form groups and associations to advance those goals collectively. These organizations often adopt rules and procedures that do not conform to liberal principles of justice. Most obviously, they may fail to treat all members equally (think, for example, of the Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women). This is, however, tolerated in a liberal society because membership in these organizations is voluntary. People who don’t like the way they’re being treated can leave.
Not everyone is totally happy with this arrangement, however, because some of these organizations are quite large and powerful. And so liberal theorists have often sought ways to force them to bring their internal norms into alignment with the principles of justice that prevail in the public sphere. One strategy for doing this is to cast doubt on how truly voluntary membership in the organization is. For example, a high-profile conflict also arose in Ontario over the fact that many Muslim women were opting to have their divorce agreements settled through private arbitration, based on religious principles that wound up granting them much less than they would be entitled to under Canadian family law. A popular argument among those who wanted to suppress this practice was that the agreement of these women was not truly voluntary, because any refusal to follow religious authorities would have been costly to them in various ways.
There are obviously situations in which costs may be so great as to constitute duress, but the general form of the argument is one that opens the door to unlimited interference in associational life, by imposing more and more exacting standards of voluntariness, so that anything less than ideal conditions is taken to vitiate consent. This has been a common refrain in the effort to impose increasingly narrow conditions on sexual consent. Perhaps the most widely abused argument in this space has been the suggestion that mere inequality (or “asymmetries of power”) render the disadvantaged party unable to freely consent. For example, the surprisingly puritanical attitude that many YIPs have toward sex between adults of different ages is often defended on the grounds that such relationships cannot be truly voluntary (and so need not be tolerated), merely because of the age difference. Again, it is not difficult to see how a private moral view is being laundered into a liberal-sounding argument for telling other people how to lead their lives.
My goal here has not been to make YIPs sound more sophisticated than they are. The vast majority probably think about these issues in “I’m right and you’re wrong” terms. The chain of transmission that an argument follows from academia to TikTok is like a game of broken telephone.
Yet while flagrantly illiberal arguments may get a lot of attention, they are not very successful at generating action. Superficially liberal arguments, by contrast, cannot be summarily dismissed and so have some track record of success at getting action. Precisely because these arguments move in the space of genuine ambiguity, they cannot be ignored completely but must in each case be assessed on their merits. This is what makes them so tricky to deal with. It’s not as though liberal theorists have everything worked out perfectly, and YIPs just came along and started abusing or misunderstanding their claims. It’s precisely the lack of clear answers to these boundary questions that makes these arguments easy to abuse in defense of non-liberal purposes. This is why we have no choice but to pay closer attention to how the arguments work, and respond to them on their own terms.
Joseph Heath is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and writes the Substack In Due Course.
In next week’s installment of “Why Liberalism,” Jonathan Rauch will explore why liberalism likely still represents the “end of history”—and why liberals need to grow a backbone.
The “Why Liberalism” series is a project of Persuasion in partnership with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS is a non-profit organization that promotes a freer, more humane, and open society by connecting and supporting talented graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals who are advancing the principles and practice of freedom. For additional information and details, media, programmatic, and funding opportunities, visit TheIHS.org.
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