Introduction
Liberalism today enjoys a widespread and nearly unchallenged consensus in the West and is a major force even outside the West. Its ascendency and consequent dominance since the Second World War has been remarkable, resulting in a situation where any alternative to liberalism seems almost unthinkable. Society today is so thoroughly permeated by liberal habits of thought that nearly everyone, including most self-described conservatives, accept basic liberal principles.
Nevertheless, in spite of its tremendous success, liberalism is at bottom incoherent and therefore fundamentally at odds with basic reality. Such an ideology becomes inhuman and destructive. It is important, then, to oppose liberalism and to articulate an alternative that is coherent and accepts the basic features of reality that liberalism rejects.
Before proposing such an alternative, however, it is important first to understand liberalism at a fundamental level. This is important for two reasons: first, when dealing with a foe as formidable and resilient as liberalism, arguments that do not attack it at its foundation will be ultimately ineffective as liberalism finds ways to adapt itself to apparent contradictions that remain superficial; second, when one attacks liberalism, one is liable to adopt liberal principles himself if he does not fully understand its basic commitments. The upshot is that one perpetuates liberalism in the long run even while claiming to oppose it by strengthening the consensus around its fundamental tenets.
This essay is therefore my effort towards a deeper understanding of liberalism. I attempt to lay out the basic principles of liberalism as well as some of the central features of its contemporary expression. The essay is not meant to be an exhaustive account of liberalism, but rather its aim is to clarify the relationship between certain key attributes of modern liberalism on the one hand and its underlying principles on the other in order to demonstrate how the former—which on a superficial analysis may often seem to contradict liberalism’s principles—follow logically from the latter. For this reason, I devote particular attention to attributes that may appear most counter to liberalism’s principles of freedom and equality and how liberalism attempts to resolve these tensions. Finally, I discuss how the contradictions inherent in making equal freedom society’s ultimate end culminate in a tyrannical and even totalitarian state. The thoughts expressed in this essay owe a lot to James Kalb’s influence and—while not consciously intended this way—might be considered something of a précis of his work.
Principles of Liberalism
Liberalism is based on two fundamental principles: freedom and equality. A third, neutrality, is important to liberalism’s contemporary self-understanding and can be regarded as an entailment of the twin principles of freedom and equality.
Freedom
The first principle of liberalism is freedom or liberty (not equality, as some mainstream conservatives suppose). In modern parlance it is often characterized as personal or individual autonomy. Man ought to be free to pursue his own vision of the good without the government, or society, or other individuals or institutions imposing their own conception of the good upon the individual. Therefore, man ought to be free of external constraints to which he did not consent since such constraints might conflict with his view of the good life. Because men disagree on what is good and true and because ultimate truth cannot be proved (so the argument goes), it is unjust for society to coerce man into abiding by a vision of the good to which he does not assent. Therefore, society ought to be organized upon the principle of freedom, whereby each individual can choose for himself his own vision of the good by which to live. In this way, society minimizes unjust coercion and conflict and allows every individual to pursue his own happiness and to follow what he believes is good and right.
Of course, the reader will recognize that the modern individual living in a liberal society is anything but free from external constraints. We will examine later how liberalism reconciles its favored constraints with its commitment to freedom.
Equality
Liberalism’s second principle is equality. Equality is not an independent principle in its own right, but follows from liberalism’s prior commitment to freedom: because freedom does not refer to any standard outside itself – to do so would be to presuppose a conception of the good that is not consented to and thus would violate liberalism’s first principle – it has no way of judging one man’s conception of the good superior to another’s. Therefore, different conceptions of the good must be regarded as each equally valid for an individual pursue.
Because there is no substantive content to the liberal conception of freedom, liberalism must treat the various conceptions of the good as reducible to the desires that one might happen to have: for example, the desire to worship God can in principle be treated no differently from the desire to eat ice cream for every meal, because to allow that the former might be more important than the latter would be to assume a particular conception of the good (i.e., one that assumes that God exists and is worthy of worship), the very thing that liberalism aims to prescind from. The principle of equality requires then that desires are treated equally and liberalism becomes the project of achieving equal preference satisfaction for individuals.
Equality acts as a limiting principle upon freedom: goals conflict, and man’s actions can limit the freedom of others, so for a society to function, man’s freedom cannot be unlimited. In one sense then, it is true—as some mainstream conservatives suppose—that freedom and equality are in conflict. However, the true function of equality is to preserve freedom by ensuring that one man does not use his freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Liberalism thus says that you can do what you please, insofar as you do not infringe upon the equal rights of others. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Or more colloquially: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Freedom is liberalism’s ultimate good, while equality functions as its principle of justice.
Neutrality
As liberalism claims to treat all comprehensive visions of the good as equally valid, it claims that it is neutral with respect to visions of the good. While such a claim might seem ludicrous to conservatives and anti-liberals, it nevertheless is key to the self-understanding of late-stage liberalism: if liberalism were not conceived of as being neutral, some visions of the good would be favored over others, and the principles of freedom and equality would be vitiated. Public reason with respect to policy decisions and the like must be conducted on the basis of neutral principles accessible to all and which do not presuppose some disputed conception of the good (e.g., reasoning based upon religious principles).
The aim of liberalism might then be said to ensure that everyone is equally free to pursue his own vision of the good through the principle of public neutrality.
We can envision the liberal principles of freedom, equality, and neutrality as a sort of unholy trinity: freedom begets equality because the liberal conception of freedom has no reference to anything outside itself, so there is no standard by which to judge competing theories of the good; thus, they must all be treated as equal. From freedom and equality proceed neutrality: if society were to favor one vision of the good over another, then competing visions of the good would not be treated equally and the freedom of men to pursue conceptions of the good not favored by society would be curtailed. Thus, neutrality is a necessary entailment of freedom and equality as understood by modern liberalism1.
Definition of Liberalism
With these principles in hand, we are ready to formulate a definition of liberalism:
Liberalism is the political doctrine that society should be so organized so that all men are equally free to pursue their own visions of the good. Society should constrain men’s free actions only insofar as they infringe on other men’s equal right to this freedom.
Other traditionalist writers have formulated their own definitions of liberalism. James Kalb has pithily described it as the idea that society ought to be organized to ensure the “equal preference satisfaction for individuals”. Bonald defines its fundamental principle as “personal autonomy guaranteed by public neutrality toward different private principles” and elsewhere as “procedural neutrality between competing comprehensive doctrines of the good”. Mark Richardson describes it as maximizing personal autonomy by removing unchosen constraints. Zippy defines liberalism as the political doctrine that securing liberty is what justifies the exercise of political authority. All of these formulations are variations on the same theme, that ensuring equal freedom should be the primary aim of government. Importantly, liberals themselves characterize liberalism in such terms, defusing any charge of concocting a strawman2.
Liberalism and Rationalism
In the real world, liberalism supplements the abstract principles of freedom and equality with practical mechanisms to secure equal freedom for all—to the extent possible—in the face of conflicting claims, since freedom and equality do not give rise to any sort of order by themselves. These mechanisms should themselves be established according to neutral principles, so that society does not impose its own conception of the good in distributing justice.
The favored approach for modern liberalism to distribute equal freedom is in accordance with rationalist principles. In this context, rationalism refers to the perspective that things ought to be ordered according to impersonal, universal, explicit, and comprehensive rules. The paradigmatic model for such a system of rules is the scientific enterprise, which is likewise regarded as consisting of objective, universal laws. Such a system does not appeal to any controversial transcendent vision of the good but merely to procedural rules that facilitate the efficient distribution of equal freedom, so it is not itself seen as imposing a controversial vision of the good on society, in a similar way to how the established claims of science are regarded as non-controversial and neutral.
Because such rules constructed along rationalist lines are impersonal and universal, they are regarded as being neutral: they do not appear to favor one person over another according to particularist prejudices and they treat everyone the same. Procedural mechanisms formulated according to rationalist principles allow society to prescind from questions about substantive goods and judge everything according to formal criteria, also presenting an appearance of neutrality. That the rules be explicit and comprehensive is important in being seen as rational: ordering principles that cannot be fully articulated or grasped—e.g., a transcendent ordering principle—appeal to something beyond man’s ken and are therefore suspected of imposing a conception of the good on society since they are thought not to be rationally demonstrable, thereby opening themselves to challenge. Likewise, rules that are non-comprehensive imply that certain areas of life involve substantive public goods—i.e., things that are good independent of our individual desiring or choosing them—that cannot be assimilated to the rationalist project of reducing everything to formal criteria. The role rationalism plays in contemporary liberalism and how it manifests in concrete circumstances will become clearer throughout the rest of the essay.
(Part 2)
Central Features of Liberalism
With an understanding of the basic principles of liberalism now in hand, we can explain how some of the key features of contemporary liberalism follow from these principles. My aim here is to clarify the relationship between liberalism’s stated belief in equal freedom and those features in particular that might seem to contradict this principle, how liberalism attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions on its own terms and how such features may even be demanded by its own internal logic.
Meritocracy
Meritocracy, technocracy, and managerialism are related terms all often used to describe complementary aspects of the modern liberal regime. Meritocracy refers to rule by the most qualified and intelligent. Technocracy refers to rule by technical experts along rational, scientific lines. Managerialism refers to the bureaucratic attempt to control or manage society in compliance with such rational, scientific principles.
It might seem odd to describe modern leftism as meritocratic, given its support of such manifestly non-meritocratic practices such as racial preferences (a.k.a. affirmative action) and its knee-jerk dismissal of inherited group differences. Indeed, this is one of the chief grievances of right-liberals against left-liberals: that the left bases decisions upon criteria other than merit.
Nevertheless, while acknowledging tensions here, the over-reliance on formal qualifications, the professionalization of every aspect of life, and the increased stratification of society by educational achievement and intelligence suggests that meritocracy is a real and significant feature of modern life.
Under liberalism, society is regarded as a machine for maximizing equal preference satisfaction, so the goal becomes achieving this maximization as efficiently as possible. Such a view renders politics a technical problem, to which meritocracy is well-suited. Thus, the emphasis on formal qualifications and the reliance on credentialed experts and studies. Such criteria are regarded as rational and neutral, given that they do not appeal to a person’s innate and unchosen characteristics, such as sex, ethnicity, or circumstances of birth.
Transnational bureaucracies and global markets are the favored means for coordinating and fulfilling men’s individual preferences in as efficient a manner as possible, since they organize society along abstract, universal, and (allegedly) neutral lines. Such global institutions require a talented and vast managerial class to run them and ensure their smooth operation. Moreover, the anti-human goal of maximum preference satisfaction requires massive social re-engineering, and a technocratic class is needed to effectuate and manage such a transformation. Meanwhile, traditional distinctions, such as sex and ethnicity, are viewed as irrational since they are immune to the sorts of formal criteria favored by liberalism and cannot be absorbed into the rational world order based on such neutral and universal standards. Such distinctions treat people unequally based on characteristics over which they have no control, and they limit man’s freedom by closing off certain roles and opportunities to him a priori. They also represent a competing source of authority independent of such standards. Another function of the technocratic class is therefore to suppress such distinctions wherever they pop up in public life.
Despite requiring tremendous effort to realize such a radical transformation, the ruling class elite have a further incentive of self-interest to support liberal ideology and reject organic traditional ways of organizing society because it favors the maintenance of their rule (in a similar way to how tax lawyers are unlikely to favor streamlining of the tax code). Rule by the smartest is also clearly flattering in a way that traditional claims to power are not.
Consequences of Meritocracy
It is worth drawing brief attention to a couple of the consequences of organizing society along meritocratic and technocratic lines. One is the increased significance ascribed to career and wealth. The accumulation of formal qualifications and the advancement of one’s career become key metrics of evaluation acceptable to the neutral rational standards favored by liberalism and mark one as a member of the technocratic elite. Success as measured by these metrics are allegedly open to all and are subject to rational evaluation. Complementing this, liberalism insists that things like family and religion have no publicly authoritative role and be regarded as preferences no different from any other preference one might happen to have. This invariably diminishes the relevance such things take on in people’s lives, so people instead tend to look to career to find fulfillment. With traditional distinctions and hierarchies eradicated, career and wealth take on an increased and distorted importance as an indicator of status. Ironically, then, the insistence on equality leads to a hierarchy based on wealth and career achievement.
Unlike in more traditional societies where wealth is tied to certain responsibilities toward the common good, wealth in liberal society is a means to fulfill the individual’s desires. The upshot is that the status and power associated with money comes to be seen as arbitrary since it is disconnected from its former public functions and responsibilities. This phenomenon feeds class resentment. When instead income inequalities are visibly connected to public duties and roles, wealth is seen to have a function that benefits society as a whole, and class antagonism evaporates to a significant degree (for example, one hears comparatively very little about class conflict in feudal Europe). Indeed, one of the functions of the modern welfare state is as a sort of patch to alleviate class envy precipitated by liberalism’s own principles.
A second consequence of liberal meritocracy is (paradoxically) increased stupidity. Things that are not subject to quantification, prediction, and control, e.g, science and technology, are regarded as unknowable or even irrational. As a consequence, while in fields amenable to such ways of thinking society has made great strides, outside of this paradigm people have lost their ability to think. If something is not predictable or controllable in the way science is, there is no way of knowing it, and so everything not quantifiable becomes subjective or even illusory. To avert this fate, quantitative methods or pseudo-quantitative methods are forced onto fields outside the hard sciences, resulting in a semblance of certitude that is not really there (e.g., the replication crisis in the social sciences). Because these methods are poorly suited to such fields and are opaque and alien to the ways of thinking that are traditionally applied to these areas of knowledge, we end up with a neo-gnostic elite comprised of a cadre of ‘experts’ who determine how best to apply the scientific method to these fields and who formulate policy and sociological recommendations along such ‘rational’ lines. Thus, because liberal meritocracy requires being able to measure something in order to evaluate it, our society becomes stupider as we lose our ability to evaluate things that are not measurable. Moreover, because cultural and traditional ways of thinking are not quantifiable or subject to formalization, tradition is eliminated in favor of rational control, and since tradition is the lens through which we apprehend and make sense of the world, people are enstupidated by its removal.
The Oppressor-Oppressed Paradigm
Equal freedom is both the legitimizing foundation and the goal of the liberal regime. Yet things remain stubbornly and manifestly unequal. To admit that certain things might be unequal by nature would threaten the liberal project because it would suggest that there may be features that cannot be subsumed under the principle of equal freedom and would represent a potential rival principle for social organization. Liberalism likewise cannot itself be the cause of existing inequalities because this would demonstrate its incoherence and delegitimize it. Instead, liberalism insists that inequalities are socially constructed, the result of traditions and patterns of thought that have been shaped by institutions and the dominant culture to privilege certain groups over others. Since all humans are equal, the fact that some groups are not equal in certain respects must be because they are being oppressed by some other group of people. Extant inequalities then are due to a privileged ‘oppressor’ group that uses these institutions to benefit themselves at the expense of underprivileged ‘oppressed’ groups. The oppressor group represents an obstacle to equal freedom for the oppressed. To achieve equal freedom then, the oppressor group and their power structures must be weakened or eliminated.
This framing helps to explain some of the apparently contradictory features of modern liberalism: many favored liberal policies that appear on their face to be antithetical to equality are in fact measures aimed to achieve true equality for oppressed groups by targeting the oppressor group du jour that stands in the way of equal freedom. The recent anti-white hysteria, for example, is a consequence of whites being regarded as the oppressor group, who benefit from inherited privileges and institutions that were created to further their interests. The racial preferences favored by the left, despite conflicting with the goals of meritocracy described in the last section, are one instrument they deploy to rectify this alleged injustice.
The oppressor and oppressed classes are not the whole story, however. Because the oppressed class is virtually powerless against the oppressor class and the oppressor class has an interest in maintaining the status quo, nothing would ever happen if this were all there was to it. It is the duty of society to root out such inequalities by opposing the oppressor class and aiding the oppressed class. A third group with power of their own but who are motivated by noble goals rather than by self-interest is required to fight the oppressor class in behalf of the oppressed class in order to help the latter achieve equal freedom. We might refer to this class as the change agents. These are the liberal ideologues and social justice warriors who work through the media, NGOs, government, and the universities.
The oppressor-oppressed paradigm allows liberalism to frame the problems besetting society as owing their existence to traditional arrangements of institutional inequality, and never say, to liberalism itself. It enables liberalism to cast the solution as ever more liberalism, giving itself a raison d’etre and justifying the need for the continual transformation of society. So long as there exists inequality in the world, liberalism requires a scapegoat on whom to blame it. In this way, the oppressor-oppressed dynamic is highly useful to liberalism. For example, it is good for liberalism’s continued existence for blacks never to achieve equality with whites, because it allows liberalism to delegate whites as the oppressor class to oppose in the struggle for true equality. If such inequalities were to vanish, the job of liberalism would be complete.
It is worth noting that this is not a phenomenon unique to liberalism. It is a tendency that will be present in any modernist ideology that tries to immanentize the eschaton. The actors just change depending on the flavor of modernism. For example, for Marx, the change agents were the Communist Party, and the oppressor class was the capitalist class standing in the way of equal freedom for the ‘Other’, which in this case was the proletariat. For the Nazis, the change agents were the Nazi party, and the oppressor class was the Jews standing in the way of the free and equal new man of the German volk.
Relationship between Liberalism and Leftism3
The oppressor-oppressed paradigm can help us to understand how leftism relates to liberalism. When leftism is contrasted with liberalism, it describes more a contrast in attitudes and modes than it does an essential distinction in basic political orientation. The liberal represents the rational face of liberalism, favoring public neutrality and equal preference satisfaction in order to maximize individual autonomy. The leftist represents the oppressor-oppressed face of liberalism, where there are favored and disfavored groups. From the liberal perspective, it is wrong to condemn an entire group of people as evil because this would be to apply a non-neutral standard of judgement and would infringe the equal freedom of those individuals who are members of the condemned group. However, on the liberal view, Christians and conservatives condemn entire groups of people, so they ought to be opposed and condemned. But for the liberal straightforwardly to advocate doing so is self-refuting.
Leftism, by appealing to the oppressor-oppressed paradigm, supplies the missing premise: white Christians, being oppressors, are an obstacle to equal freedom, so they must be opposed and eradicated in order to achieve equal freedom. The leftist provides the goal (or, charitably, the means)—obliteration of the white race, for example—while the liberal provides the abstract, universal, neutral and disinterested moral principle.
Liberalism therefore needs leftism to function in a manner that is not flatly contradictory. Leftism supplies the rationale that enables liberalism to oppose and condemn groups in their aim to transform society.
The way in which leftism needs liberalism to function is more subtle. One could imagine a worldview that only recognized oppressor and oppressed classes, but without any mediating or universalizing liberal principles. In this case, however, the so-called oppressor groups would be following the same dictates as the so-called oppressed groups, namely, group survival, share of power, etc. What is needed is a universal principle that justifies the oppressed groups but to which the oppressor class cannot appeal. Liberalism provides such a principle because it recognizes only the individual rather than any sort of collective groups. ‘Oppressor’ classes, such as whites, cannot appeal to liberal principles qua whites because liberalism does not recognize rights belonging to collective bodies over and above the individuals that comprise it.
Is there an obvious contradiction here? It would appear so, as liberalism positively endorses the collective identities of so-called oppressed groups. Here again though, the liberal and leftist poles of liberalism combine to provide a synthesis to avoid the contradiction: collective identities of oppressed classes are permitted only insofar as they are impressed into service of the goal of radical individual autonomy by destroying any collective identity that the dominant majority and culture (the oppressor class) might have. Consider: what is the justification given for the existence of a collective identity on the part of some ‘victim’ minority? The justification is not fundamentally so that its members can preserve their own culture and honor their ancestors (even if these things are sometimes also encouraged); rather, the justification is their very status as members of an ‘oppressed’ class: members of such oppressed classes see their collective identities primarily in terms of being victims, of intolerance towards them, of past sufferings at the hands of their oppressors, etc. Their collective identity is needed to challenge and subvert the oppression of the oppressor class, because this oppression is an obstacle to the freedom and equality of the individual members of such minority groups. Indeed, the very reason for the existence of collective identities for such oppressed groups is often thought to be precisely because the oppressor class has excluded and ‘othered’ them, thereby foisting on the former a collective identity as excluded. These collective identities are therefore defined by something entirely negative, giving them something of a tenuous existence: once the exclusionary oppressor class that has defined the minority identity is destroyed, the minority will have lost its raison d’etre, having no positive content remaining to comprise its identity. The upshot is that since the collective identities of ‘oppressed’ groups are subject to the same destructive elements to which the majority culture is subject, they will suffer the same fate in the long run. Liberalism pays lip service to the preservation of minority cultures, all while dissolving them with its universal acid.
Liberalism presents as the reasonable face of the liberal-cum-leftist worldview. This feature enables another way for liberalism to support leftism by rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Leftism is too extreme for most people and would elicit a strong reaction if taken neat. Liberalism provides the spoonful of sugar to help the leftism go down (to mix my metaphors). When people fear that leftist measures are intended to destroy whites or Christians or the traditional family, liberals ensure us that they have no intention of doing this; rather, they just want to make the good life accessible to more groups of people by widening the circle of equal freedom to include blacks, religious minorities, and homosexuals. This motte-and-bailey strategy allows leftism to advance under the cover of a more reasonable sounding liberalism.
The oppressor-oppressed paradigm therefore allows liberalism to reconcile its liberal and leftist modes with each complementing the other.
The Eclipse of Neutrality
In recent years with the rise of wokeness, the observer will have noted that neutrality plays a much-diminished role in the public justification for liberal causes, having been eclipsed by the oppressor-oppressed paradigm. In fact, neutrality itself has become suspect as a cover for justifying privilege: to be neutral with respect to the oppressor and oppressed classes is to legitimate hate, bigotry, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. of the oppressed class that stands in the way of liberation for the oppressed classes. Why should the oppressor classes be permitted equal right to their points of view when such views will simply be used to obstruct the equal freedom of the oppressed classes and perpetuate their oppression?
This development is representative of a more general phenomenon of liberalism, whereby the current instantiation of liberalism turns on its predecessors: as liberalism matures in accordance with its own internal principles and acquires greater self-understanding, it purges elements of earlier versions of liberalism that have outlived their usefulness or are deemed inimical to liberalism’s true nature, as often these earlier features of liberalism come to be regarded as tools for maintaining vestigial structures of privilege and inequality.
A consequence of this general phenomenon is that liberalism often sees its predecessor as its arch-enemy, as for example, modern left-liberals regard classical right-liberals (i.e., mainstream conservatives) as little better than Nazis trying to maintain sexist and racist and homophobic power structures.
Though neutrality appears to have faded in the role it plays in liberalism’s self-understanding, it nevertheless was a key ingredient of modern liberalism’s theoretical justification for the last half century, so it is still useful as an aid to understanding many features of modern liberalism. And of course, there still remain many liberals who appeal to it. It remains to be seen whether a new theoretical synthesis to replace the old neutrality-based one will emerge in the coming years or whether a crude oppressor-oppressed narrative will simply overwhelm all other liberal commitments.
(To be continued… )
- The reader might question the inclusion of neutrality as a key principle of modern liberal thought: it does not seem to play the central role it once did in liberalism’s self-understanding; indeed, sometimes it is now even attacked by the modern left. I will address this briefly in a later part of the essay. ↩︎
- For example, from “The Unexpected Persistence of John Rawls”: “I might believe that the best life requires solitary contemplation, while you are committed to unbridled hedonism, and yet despite these differences, we can nevertheless agree that we should each have a bundle of rights that protects our ability to pursue these incompatible visions—not least because they protect us each from interference by the other. Instead of trying to resolve the deeper questions that divide us, Rawls suggested that we focus on the shallowest possible bases of agreement, in order to achieve what he called an “overlapping consensus.” Or, by the same author in “Illiberal Liberalism”: “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.” For a final example, see “Individual Autonomy is Not the Enemy of a Humane Liberalism” for the central role autonomy plays in liberalism. These examples were all taken from articles I happened to come across at the same time I was finalizing this essay draft, many others could be added. Mark Richardson documents such examples of liberals’ self-understanding of liberalism at his blog. ↩︎
- This section is inspired by Bonald’s post “The liberal mind and the leftist mind”. ↩︎