Defending classical liberalism begins with defining it and its enemies.
Defending classical liberalism begins with defining it and its enemies.
T here’s a lot of talk these days about illiberalism. It’s usually a pejorative, although for a while, some thinkers on the right were branding themselves as “post-liberal” and criticizing liberalism in its classical form. But like many words in politics, illiberalism occasions its share of confusion and misuse, both deliberate and out of misunderstanding.
The Birth of Liberalism
The troubles with defining illiberalism derive in good part from the long degradation of the term “liberal” in the first place. As originally understood, liberals believed in liberty. What we are now compelled to call “classical” liberalism drew on its share of ancient and medieval sources, but it mostly emerged as something like a coherent framework for seeing the world in the late 18th century.
As the notion took root in America and the English-speaking world, liberals believed in the creed of the Declaration of Independence: that all men were both created equal and endowed with inalienable, natural-law rights and liberties that government was bound to respect. At the core of these rights were free speech, free exercise of religious conscience, the right to one’s home and family, the right to practice a trade and sell one’s own labor and its fruits, and due process of law.
Liberalism did not necessarily require democracy, written constitutions, or republican government, although all of those things were frequently promoted by liberals as the systems likeliest to produce and protect liberties. They have become largely inseparable in the centuries since, by practice as much as by theory. Republicanism in the sense of freedom from aristocratic or clerical privilege was an essential component of the concept that all had equal rights. Liberalism necessarily demanded the supremacy of the rule of law over the arbitrary government of a crowned head, which is best protected by writing the rules down. Liberalism incorporated free markets and free enterprise on the Lockean theory that freedom of contract and the sanctity of control over one’s property were elements of the natural rights of man, as well as on the practical grounds that a man who controlled his own land and labor had a depth of freedom beyond mere parchment guarantees.
Was liberalism the natural enemy of conservatism? The English did not think so, because their society already had liberal traditions, albeit without the sorts of firm protections that Americans wanted in the form of written constitutions, strict separation of powers, and hard limitations on government. Thus, Anglo-American liberals could often simultaneously be men of conservative temperament and philosophy, even if liberalism threatened some particular institutions or arrangements.
But liberalism was more disruptive to the existing order outside of the English-speaking world. In societies such as Mexico and the rest of Latin America where the Catholic Church was deeply entrenched as a property holder and political power, for example, liberalism became associated with aggressive anti-clericalism that often alienated liberals from the faithful, and conservatives from the liberal tradition.
Also, philosophy and reality have a way of diverging. Societies in the 18th and 19th centuries were sometimes quite liberal in some ways, side by side with being deeply illiberal in others. Some rights were universal to men and women, while others were exclusive to men. Britain was liberal at the same time that it was still largely governed by its aristocracy, which retained special privileges such as an almost exclusive lock on the role of military officers. The American South was one of the world’s most liberal societies before the Civil War (if less so than the North) — for white men, while black slaves had no liberties at all. Of course, just as liberalism tends to erode illiberalism (as happened with the death of slavery in the American North after the Revolution and in the British Empire in 1833), the same dynamic could work the other way, too. The South, for example, was more restrictive regarding free speech than the North whenever any question of speech intersected with the pervasive controls required to keep slaves ignorant and unorganized.
From the beginning, liberalism’s universal claims ran into questions of definition. Slavery was a violation of every individual right of the slave — but its abolition or restriction also meant trampling upon the theoretically inalienable property rights of the slaveowner. To hold that the former overrode the latter required the application of moral judgment to pure theory. We see something similar today in the abortion debate, where one side argues against the extinguishing of every natural-law right of the unborn, while the other side argues for the sanctity of the mother’s liberty of bodily autonomy. Resolving such debates requires appeals to truths more fundamental than the liberal ideals and frameworks invoked by both sides.
The Decline of Economic Liberty
The straightforward, unitary understanding of liberalism that existed in 19th-century debates over liberty and the equal application of law ran into much more definitional trouble in the decades from the 1880s on. Waves of economic populism and progressivism in America and other Western societies saw expanded efforts to constrict economic liberties to contract and control one’s labor and property. Those restrictions often traduced as well the equal-treatment principle of liberalism, because deprivations of economic liberty often draw distinctions between favored winners and disfavored losers in the economy.
The people pushing these expansions of state control still considered themselves liberals to the extent that they supported core civil and political rights, but they began systematically defining economic liberties out of the list of liberties that make up liberalism. The apogee of this effort was the Supreme Court’s famous footnote 4 in United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), in which Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote that laws should be presumed constitutional unless they conflicted with the express provisions of the Bill of Rights — but, crucially, he also listed a series of categories of laws that might also trigger heightened judicial scrutiny, and that list was conspicuously composed of civil and political rights, while excluding economic liberties:
It is unnecessary to consider now whether legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation is to be subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation. On restrictions upon the right to vote . . . on restraints upon the dissemination of information . . . on interferences with political organizations . . . and . . . as to prohibition of peaceable assembly . . .
Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious . . . or national . . . or racial minorities . . . whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry.
Despite its lack of basis in the more expansively liberal constitutional text, the Carolene Products footnote has been one of the foundational concepts for generations of progressives in thinking about liberalism. Post-Carolene progressive liberalism is a creed of individual self-expression and a system of politics, rather than a broad framework, rooted in the natural law, that protects not only the atomized individual but the liberty of the individual’s relations with family, community, the economy, and private institutions. The critics of liberalism on the right are missing the point when they say that liberalism is solely individual and material: Properly and originally understood, it created a much wider sphere in which the individual could relate to his or her fellows.
Having amputated the limbs of liberalism in law, Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked the language, appropriating the word “liberal” for his progressive agenda. He did so out of cynical political necessity: Woodrow Wilson’s administration had so badly discredited progressivism that it ended with the biggest landslide victory in American popular vote history for a conservative Republican promising “a return to normalcy.” FDR, as the running mate on the ticket on the receiving end of that walloping, understood the lesson. Accordingly, American progressives have gone under the name of “liberals” for more than eight decades now, teaching voters to associate the word liberal with values quite different from liberty. The so-called liberals replaced the right to control one’s own property and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor with the “right” to demand the property of others and to confiscate the fruits of their labor.
The Decline of Equal Treatment
The next prop to fall, and from similar causes, was the ideal of equal treatment under law. Even as that ideal was being eroded by assaults on economic liberty, mid-century American liberal progressives were championing it in the fields of black civil rights and women’s equal rights. But by the 1970s, these movements turned toward equality rather than equal rights — in other words, a search for equal outcomes that required unequal treatment. This manifested itself not only in bald-faced race discrimination in the form of racial preferences and set-asides, but in efforts to ensure that, say, women were “liberated” from pregnancy, on the theory that it was unequal and unfair that men can’t get pregnant and women can.
Once again, the claims of liberalism ran into problems of definition: Can same-sex couples have an equal right to marriage without changing the definition of what marriage is? Can a man become a woman? Those questions cannot be answered merely by liberal theory, but it is not illiberal to examine reality itself, whether scientific, historical, or social, in order to describe the world to which liberal premises apply. Nor does it somehow disprove the principles of classical liberalism to observe that it does not answer every question about reality or morality, or that its slogans can be misused by its enemies.
The moral panics and intellectual fads of the woke era brought many of the illiberal implications of “equity” to the fore. While liberalism is properly understood to allow people to associate in groups and communities, and to allow those groupings to defend their rights of association, it demands that the law treat each individual as an individual, having inalienable rights, rather than as a representative of some group, carrying the positive or negative status in the law of that group. But woke identity politics demands the opposite — the creation of a new set of racial and other identity-based hierarchies in the name of retribution.
The very core of liberalism — free speech, free exercise of religious conscience, due process of law, and equal justice under written law — came under continuous assault by the forces of progressivism. We encountered all manner of tramplings upon these rights by socially woke institutions and progressive government in the name of gender, race, and LBGTQ+∞ equity. That assault seems to be only temporarily stalled right now because those forces have been evicted from power in the federal government.
Illiberalism’s Lure
The march of illiberalism is easy to see on the left. But the confusion over liberalism makes it harder to name its opposite. That is especially true when illiberalism comes from the right, because decades of abuse of the word have led many conservatives to be allergic to liberalism being a good thing. In its classical sense, it is at the heart of the distinctive and exceptional American system — it is our patrimony as Americans. You don’t have to believe that liberalism is the sum of American culture (it never has been) to recognize that its defense is a defense of the American idea and the American system.
Skepticism of classical liberalism on the right has always been with us. In its weaker form, this is simply a matter of reminding people that there are many good and essential things in life that are not liberal or products of liberalism. Family, community, patriotism, faith, virtue — these things do not come from natural rights (at most, they come from their exercise, not from the rights themselves), and they require particular commitments to some people and ideas in preference to others, where liberalism demands (within its parameters) the equal treatment of people, and to an extent an equal opportunity for ideas. This sort of caution about liberalism’s limits is a critique of liberalism only in the way that it is a critique of drinking water to say that a person who drinks water still needs food. Liberalism provides the menu; it is not the dish. This understanding is a good deal of what separates conservatives from libertarians, who aim to be a purer form of classical liberal.
But there have also always been those on the right for whom this was not strong enough stuff — people who insisted that faith and virtue need more than liberty; they need a push from the state. Brent Bozell Jr. took progressively stronger versions of this position in and after his famous debates in these pages with Frank Meyer. The Bozell view has lived in the shadows of the right since then — too theocratic for the taste of intellectuals, too patrician and paternalistic for the taste of less-educated people skeptical of being led too hard by their self-appointed betters, and too openly at odds with the American creed for either. Still, it always retained some appeal in corners of the religious right, and it enjoyed a new vogue with “post-liberal” intellectuals in recent years. Their argument is that the virtue of society has collapsed on liberalism’s watch and should be replaced with something more medieval in its governing spirit and rules, yet progressive in its institutions and approach to law.
Now, at a society-wide level, re-creating the conditions of 14th-century Europe on a continent where no such society ever existed is a utopian project of nation-building if ever I heard one. But even at the level of diagnosis, is the progressive mutilation of classical liberalism an inevitable consequence of liberalism’s system? Individuals, if left to their free will — as liberalism promises — will find virtue or vice in their own measure, on their own responsibility. But social engineering by the enemies of classical liberalism is not the fault of classical liberalism. The people cannot be saved from themselves.
Illiberalism Today
This brings us full circle to what is, and is not, illiberalism, especially from the right.
One of the confusions specific to discussion of illiberalism on the right is the claim that hostility to immigration and foreign trade is, in itself, illiberal governance. (While the left has its own issues with trade, these tend to be inseparable from the broader post-Carolene hostility to economic liberty in general.) We hear this sort of thing in a lot of discussions of Europe. It is true enough that these policy instincts derive in part from illiberal impulses. But the test of a liberal system is not whether it eradicates illiberal impulses. Conservatives, after all, understand that such impulses are part of human nature itself. A liberal system does not presume a perfectly liberal society, because no such society exists, or ever will; far less does it presume perfectly liberal humans. We are creatures of particular commitments, and we would be monsters if we were not. Liberalism instead promises rules of the road that place checks on our natural impulses to ensure that law and government operate on a basis that is equally fair to all. Thinking liberally is, like civilization itself, a thing that must be taught. Most of us innately want liberty for ourselves, but it is only our socialization by our culture and laws that trains us to want it for others.
The category error of treating restrictive immigration policies as a major feature of an illiberal system is that a liberal system promises the rule of law to its citizens, and to some lesser, baseline extent to noncitizens present within the nation. It does not promise that nations will treat every foreigner the same as every citizen. Doing so would destroy the political community that makes liberalism possible.
Like immigration restrictions, trade barriers aim to draw a line between a national community and those outside it. There is a somewhat stronger case that trade protectionism should be taken as a hallmark of illiberalism. Goods are not people. Unlike immigration restriction, trade barriers restrict the natural-law liberties of the citizen to engage in voluntary trade. But that restriction falls equally upon all within the society, and it remains a stretch to consider this to be a major symptom of the deprivation of liberty. Trade protectionism is crackpot economics, but bad ideas are not the same thing as the loss of civil liberties. Most of the original liberal societies developed within economies that failed to practice free trade. The Wealth of Nations was published only in 1776; Britain did not really shift from a mercantilist to a free-trade posture until the 19th century. The American founders zealously pursued free trade within the United States, and they hated external restrictions on American trade, but the United States didn’t become fully committed to free foreign trade until after the Second World War
On the other hand, even outside of the direct deprivation of rights of free political speech and religious conscience and other core liberties — a number of which are treated with conspicuous contempt in “liberal” Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — we should be concerned about the erosion (here and abroad) of the systemic aspects of liberal democracy, such as respect for written law, for the legitimacy of democratic electoral outcomes, and for the existence of private social institutions (the press, the churches, and the academy) outside of both the funding and the control of government.
On that latter score, we’ve seen a lot of extremely one-sided panic about “illiberalism” over right-leaning governments (abroad in places such as Hungary, or at home in places such as Florida) funding and controlling institutions of these types. Such panics almost invariably come from people who want and demand that the government fund the same institutions, then leave them in the hands of the ideological left. I’m sorry, but if you work for NPR or the BBC or a state university, you don’t get to pretend that government involvement in media and education is a dire threat to liberty. It would be much better if far fewer of these institutions were entwined with or run by the state, but so long as some are, it is better that we be open about which of them are democratic and answer to the electorate, and which are liberal and truly free. Pick one.
The Trump administration has done salutary work in closing (for now) some deeply illiberal chapters of our history. We have moved on from the heights of left-wing cancel culture, government dictation to social media, official race discrimination, and selective tolerance of antisemitism. But Trump’s pressure campaigns and vendettas have often involved deeply illiberal efforts of his own to punish unfavorable media outlets (from exclusion from the White House to Federal Communications Commission threats to pull network licenses), menace law firms for whom they employ or represent, and go after universities without due care to distinguish between punishing them for illegal discrimination and doing so for bad ideas. It is not unusual that Trump has illiberal instincts, but it is unusual the degree to which his second administration has carried them out unfiltered by law, norms, or prudence.
Within the proper sphere of things that government says and controls, there will always be areas in which we expect the government not to be neutral, but to pursue truth over falsehood, virtue over vice, and patriotism over hostility to our own people and nation. There are always questions upon which government cannot be neutral and shouldn’t pretend at neutrality while sitting down on one side of the scale. Moreover, liberalism grows ever harder to pursue and protect the larger the government grows. But the liberal rules of the road — the idea that individual liberties matter, that all should be treated equally by the law, and that the fundamental questions of the good life and civil society should be decided by a free people and not by the state — those things are essential and deeply American. “I can abuse your rights because the other guy abused mine” is not. We should respect that difference and teach it to the next generation.
I don’t even know how you would go about reviving liberalism, in its classical sense, in the Democratic Party or other parties and factions of the left around the West. It probably is a lost cause. We ought not to abandon the fight within the right, especially in America, because the classical liberal tradition is the heritage of our Founding as well as the founding of the Republican Party. We need to do it on our side because it will not be done anywhere else. But to do so, we need to be clear about what illiberalism is, and what it is not.