Should liberalism die?

Have excessive individualism and freedom eroded the values about which we should really care? And if so, should liberalism be replaced with a more community-oriented political ideology?

Written by Bo Winegard

PHILO: Liberalism is not dead. But it is plagued by an underlying and likely fatal disease. Unlike many intellectuals, I do not lament this. And if liberalism perishes, I will not grieve. In fact, I will celebrate.

For too long, we have praised liberalism. We have deferred to liberalism We have even worshipped liberalism. In a secular age, it has become our religion, our sacred narrative, whose patriarchs are Locke and Smith and Jefferson. This sacred narrative has fettered our mind and enslaved our imagination, persuading us that the highest goods in life are freedom and individualism and that all other political arrangements, all deviations from democratic liberalism, are despotic and illegitimate.

The death of liberalism will liberate us from the tyranny of liberalism. It will allow us to think more carefully and creatively about society and individualism, autonomy and order, meaning and malaise. And perhaps we will, as we reflect upon these complicated issues, recognize that there is more to life than abstract freedom, more to life than crass consumerism, hedonism, and the unceasing pursuit of the latest gadgets and gewgaws. And we will see that radical individualism, by rejecting the legitimacy of the collective, leads inevitably to disorder, decadence, and pervasive ennui.

MEANDER: Splendid rhetoric! And you even managed to say one thing with which I agree: Liberalism is not dead.

However, I would go further. Not only is it not dead, but it’s not even dying. Perhaps it is sick, to pursue your metaphor. But only with a minor ailment, not a terminal disease. It will recover and flourish again. And the reason it will flourish is that it remains the most coherent and philosophically persuasive political ideology that works not only on paper, but also in the real world.

It synthesizes and reconciles; and what it cannot reconcile, it balances. It maximizes human freedom and minimizes tribal conflict. It recognizes the flaws in humanity and does not try to eradicate our sins or mold us into something more commendable. It allows for pluralism. And it does not try to inculcate some vague notion of the common good. For it understands that modern societies are too large, too diverse for agreement about something so nebulous as existential purpose.

And while you may long wistfully for a time when society was organized by a single widely revered system of beliefs, you must recognize that such a society has been irrevocably lost. Technology and prosperity have destroyed it. Shared values are possible only in smaller communities or homogenous, stable societies. In a country as large, diverse, and technologically advanced as the United States, the ideal of a common good is as chimerical as the ideal of widespread selflessness. Worse, the ideal of a common good is actively dangerous, encouraging, as it does, the authoritarian instinct to promote a unifying narrative, a single sacred vision to order society. No, leave the common good to the city state or the medieval village. In the West, families and communities decide upon the common good. Not the government.

At their best, politics are strife. At their worst, they are war. We should not look to government for meaning or for the sacred. Only for painful compromise and the minimum necessary protection of persons and property.

I do not believe in God, but I do believe in progress. Not as a metaphysical principle, some spiritual force in the universe, but as an empirical fact. And I think liberalism is the culmination of political ideology in the West, the resolution, if you will, of clashing and contradictory ideas. It balances human nature and human aspirations better than any other ideology. We have seen this for over two hundred years. And I am hopeful that we will see it for two hundred more.

And if some alternative ever rises on the ideological ruins of liberalism, I suspect we will quickly rediscover liberalism’s virtues while groaning under the oppression of its successor.

PHILO: I suspected that we would disagree about this. Well good—few things are more tedious than agreement.

MEANDER: When I was young, I read the unabridged works of Victor Hugo.

PHILO: Ha! I hope you’ll excuse my hyperbole then. I assume that we do not need to define liberalism since such Socratic exercises are often unnecessary and unedifying, so let’s start with my major complaints about liberalism. Then we can address each in detail.

MEANDER: Excellent. Though I think a preliminary definition is a perfectly reasonable and helpful way to inaugurate a conversation. By liberalism, I mean a political ideology and arrangement that developed in the West in the 1700s and that emphasized individual rights, political consent, autonomy, equality under the law, and private property. It is now, I think we’d agree, the regnant ideology in the West, especially in the Anglosphere. Indeed, some have argued that it is the ideological “end of history”—the culmination of ideological conflict, representing the ideal synthesis of contraries beyond which it is hard to imagine a better alternative.

PHILO: Yes, I accept this preliminary definition. Essentially, liberalism grew out of the religious strife of the 1600s. Though, of course, other forces contributed. At any rate, modern liberalism is the prevailing ideology in the U. S., Canada, England, and elsewhere where Europeans predominate. And it emphasizes rule of law, private property, and individualism.

Now to my complaints.

Liberalism is too individualistic. It overestimates the power of reason. It values freedom over other equally important goods. It promotes tolerance of the outré and even the depraved which inevitably transforms from indifference, i.e., tolerance, to celebration. And it undermines itself by delegitimizing necessary discrimination against outsiders and potential exploiters. In the terms of game theory, liberalism is a losing strategy, one that is perpetually vulnerable to cheaters and defectors.

MEANDER: Before we home in on each complaint you have forwarded, I should be clear, if I wasn’t before, that I am not a utopian. I do not believe in a perfect social arrangement. I believe in bad and worse. Therefore, when I think something is the best of bad options, I commend it.

And liberalism is precisely that: the best of bad options—bad because humans are flawed, contentious creatures; bad because power is necessary but necessarily corrupts; and bad because all policies require painful tradeoffs. Order is inconsistent with absolute freedom. Absolute freedom is inconsistent with equality. Equality is inconsistent with economic growth. And so on.

PHILO: Your pessimism is quite clear—and almost inspiring I might add.

MEANDER: I am probably more optimistic than you are, however difficult that is to believe! And, at any rate, my main point is not that the world is a dreary place or that humans are execrable beings, but that all social arrangements will fall short of our ideals. If forced to choose between purgatory and damnation, we should choose purgatory. And we should leave paradise to the poets.

PHILO: You are quite right: I am more pessimistic than you are. I have a Calvinist’s sense of total human depravity. And that contributes to my antipathy to liberalism. However, rejecting liberalism does not require a dim view of humanity. Optimists should join pessimists in seeking alternatives to liberalism.

Are we prepared now, these preliminaries out of the way, to discuss my objections to liberalism?

MEANDER: Quite so.

PHILO: Excellent. My first objection: Liberalism is too individualistic. It isolates the individual from his family, his tribe, his broader community. It treats him as the fundamental unit of analysis, a kind of self-contained atom of experience—autonomous, rational, free. This is not only an empirical distortion, a misunderstanding of human nature, but also a moral distortion, the erroneous premise that poisons the entire liberal project. For once the individual is stripped from his community, the collective good is dismissed as an epiphenomenon. Good and evil are reduced to subjective sensations. Utilitarianism triumphs. And the community exists only for the pleasures of the individual.

MEANDER: Although I largely agree that liberalism is individualistic, you overstate the case. One of the fundamental assumptions of classical liberals is precisely that humans are social creatures who cooperate to solve various problems—dangerous predators, marauders, resource scarcity, et cetera. That many liberals appeal to a hypothetical social contract does not vitiate the power or the reality of society. Communities are not epiphenomenal or illusory. But they are composed of individuals and because individuals have pleasures and pains and communities do not, we should, when assessing morality, care about individuals, not communities. To put the point concisely, communities matter because individuals matter. Communities that exploit individuals are immoral even if they flourish. And if a community breaks apart, it’s only tragic because it often hurts individuals.

PHILO: But this is exactly the problem. According to this perspective, everything beyond the individual is like the roar of a vacuum cleaner—a side effect of its primary function.

MEANDER: That’s a misleading simile, though, because the sound of a vacuum cleaner does not accomplish anything. It’s just a byproduct of the engine. Ideally, we’d like perfectly silent vacuum cleaners. On the other hand, communities are functional. They allow humans to accomplish things which they could not accomplish alone.

PHILO: But the community cannot have its own interests, right? Interests only exist in the minds of individuals?

MEANDER: Yes, that’s right. Speech about community interests is like speech about a nation’s interests: It’s metaphorical. And it often distorts our understanding of the world. Strictly speaking, only individuals can have interests. Of course, nations often use romantic rhetoric about “the people” to encourage submission to a collective. And I will not deny that such rhetoric has a primitive appeal. However, I do believe that we should resist, even repudiate it. Communities are real. But they do not have interests beyond the interests of their members. Those who reify nations, who speak eloquently of sacrifice, of what you can do for your country, are elevating an idealized notion of community over the flesh and blood reality of actual humans.

PHILO: In my view, you have things exactly backward. Individuals are products of communities; they are fragments, parts, splinters. And they are ephemeral. They have no reality outside of their cultural context. On the proverbial desert island, their lives would be meaningless. They would have no consciousness, no language, no concept of self or world. They would be bestial. Abstraction can, of course, remove the “individual” from his community just as it can remove a single atom from the universe to study its isolated properties and potentialities, but in the real world, atoms exist only because they interact with other atoms, and selves exist only because they interact with other selves. Society is composed of individuals, yes, but individuals are created by society.

Now, this might sound like unnecessarily obscure and pretentious philosophizing, utterly irrelevant to practical questions about politics. But ontology is important here. Communities are not just real because individuals voluntarily cooperate in them. They are real because they precede and indeed produce individuals. And that which is good for the individual, that which brings transitory pleasure, may be harmful to the community. When I say that divorce is bad, I do not mean that it’s bad for a person, e.g., for Thomas or Sarah; I mean that it is bad for a community. It degrades a public good, a commitment device, and gradually erodes the collective family. Liberalism cannot see this because liberalism is dedicated to contractual individualism. And being thus dedicated, it can only see what is good or bad for Thomas and Sarah.

MEANDER: I appreciate the importance of philosophy, so I will not begrudge your speculative metaphysics. However, I think you are committing some variant of the genetic fallacy. Even if one accepts the claim—and I do not—that communities precede and create individuals, it does not follow that communities are more real than individuals or that we should eschew individual rights.

But since metaphysics can quickly become unhelpfully abstruse, let us focus on your concrete example: divorce. As a liberal, I do believe that divorce should be relatively easy to obtain because I believe that marriages are contractual and for the enjoyment and flourishing of the participants in the marriage. Once the marriage becomes unhappy or unfulfilling, the participants should be free to dissolve the contract just as a worker can leave his place of employment.

PHILO: If leaving a marriage becomes as easy, as shameless, as expected as leaving a job, then marriage itself is vitiated. It’s nothing more than another mundane relationship—like dating somebody in high school. And that injures the community because communities require children and children require caregivers. Marriage is not for individuals. Marriage is for children. And children are for the community. When we think about social policies, it is perfectly legitimate and wise to ask: How does this affect the community? No society should promote norms that contribute to its own evanishment.

MEANDER: Yes, but the more difficult leaving a marriage is, the more it allows abusive men and women to harass and humiliate their partners. Of course, we need to have children—but people want to have children. So if we give them the power to make their own decisions, they will do so. That does not require strict limitations on divorce. Or harsh social judgment.

Like you, I accept that humans are flawed and fallible creatures. However, I do believe that they will often choose the good if we inculcate the right norms and mores.

PHILO: Well, this brings us to my second major criticism of liberalism. It overestimates human reason. People do not often know what they truly want; and they constantly make terrible, hasty, imprudent decisions, decisions which they later regret. One does not need to look diligently to find examples. They are ubiquitous. Obesity, addiction, gambling. These are not aberrations—they are commonplaces in liberal societies.

To return to children, fertility has plummeted. Women report wanting more kids than they have. But it does not matter. They do not make the “right” decisions, even from their own perspective. And I fear that we are soon to inhabit a wasteland of sterility, effeminacy, decadence, and decay. A society that is not bound to the next generation, not inspired and disciplined by hope for its children, is lost. It may not be politically correct to say it, but this is the path to perdition. And I blame liberalism and feminism. So long as the individual and his or her reason are treated as sacrosanct, modern societies will suffer from these ailments. Sure, perhaps we’d like to increase fertility. But if rational adults choose not to have children, what is to be done? Liberalism is impotent. It must accept, even if with sadness, the decline of the West since it has no mechanism to correct the misguided decisions of individuals.

MEANDER: Though I think you make some fair criticisms of modern liberalism and especially of libertarianism, you also exaggerate and allow your penchant for rhetoric to supplant sensible argumentation. Being fond of rhetoric myself, I do not mind, but it is useful to stay grounded while engaged in these rather lofty debates lest we lose touch with reality.

Like you, I am skeptical of reason. When I said that humans will often choose the good, I also asserted that society must inculcate the right norms and mores. I do not believe in some kind of quasi-Rousseauean noble savage. Reason is limited and fallible. Humans often fail to resist temptation. And sometimes they are simply attracted to evil. Wickedness does not require some rupture in the universe; it is not a metaphysical anomaly; it is natural and inevitable. And yet, a properly ordered liberal society can contain iniquity, though it can never eliminate it. Likewise, a properly ordered liberal society can guide humans toward a fulfilling life better than any of its alternatives. Errors are unavoidable, of course. But even a nation ruled by philosopher kings would be full of mistake-prone humans clumsily making their way through life. The only way to eradicate such imperfections is to eradicate humanity.

PHILO: We understand that children and teenagers have limited cognitive abilities and often make reckless, imprudent decisions. And because of that, we corral them, discipline them, subjugate them. We do not, if we are good parents, tyrannize them. After all, we want them to explore the world and to learn from their mistakes. But we do not have an irrational commitment to their liberty. And therefore we circumscribe their freedom and limit their choices.

To take a concrete example, people are not allowed to purchase cigarettes until they are 21, the idea being that before 21 they lack the foresight to make intelligent decisions about the consumption of nicotine. Now, this seems wise to me. But why draw an arbitrary line at 21?

MEANDER: To interject—we don’t draw such an arbitrary line, as you called it, for many harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Those are always illegal.

PHILO: Do you think that those drug prohibitions are consistent with liberalism?

MEANDER: Of course. Liberalism is not anarchy or lawlessness. Perhaps some libertarians would disagree with drug prohibitions, but I am not a libertarian, and I do not believe classical liberalism is necessarily libertarian.

PHILO: What about prohibitions of pornography or other forms of obscene speech?

MEANDER: If we address each possible prohibition a liberal might allow, we will have a long, tedious discussion, one likely ending in boredom and disappointment. Liberalism is broad—and individual liberals will disagree on specifics.

PHILO: Absolutely. But this illustrates an important point: Even liberals accept that the frailty of reason has important social and legal consequences, the chief among them being that the use of the state to limit freedom is legitimate.

MEANDER: Quite true. Liberals, at least those who are not libertarians, do accept the legitimacy of some state intervention to guide humans toward desirable ends. But this is not the same as embracing the conception of a common good. The goal is to maximize freedom and personal autonomy, but these must be balanced with other compelling interests.

PHILO: That’s a nice segue to my complaint that liberalism overvalues freedom and personal autonomy. By making this complaint, I do not mean that freedom is bad, of course. But liberalism misunderstand the complex nature of real freedom, focusing almost exclusively on negative freedom—or freedom from constraint. And thus liberalism promotes an etiolated version of freedom, one that does not in fact maximize the ability of individuals to make fulfilling choices, but instead maximizes their anxiety and emptiness as they are confronted with thousands of unsatisfying options. Our stores have two hundred brands of toothpaste, but our culture has no guide to meaning, to transcendence, to the deep satisfaction of communal experience. Because of this spiritual emptiness, liberalism’s vaunted attachment to freedom is, in fact, little more than a childish bitterness at coercion and constraint. It is satanic, in the Miltonian sense of the word.

I do not begrudge liberals for resenting and rebelling against authority since most creative and energetic humans begin by challenging the status quo and bristling under the demands of an apparently alien power. But I do begrudge liberals for enshrining this rebellion in a political philosophy since healthy humans ultimately grow out of such a stage of defiance and learn to see the wisdom of custom and constraint. They integrate the alien and become enmeshed in a community’s way of life.

MEANDER: You are right that freedom is complicated. For example, who is freer: A single man who lives in the woods without any social obligations or constraints or a married man with kids who lives in a city and works for a prestigious law firm? The man in the woods, of course, does not need to conform to the expectations of others; he does not need to compromise with his wife; he does not need to drive his kids to and from school; and he does not need to truckle to an imperious boss. On the other hand, he needs to work diligently to gather his food, to create and maintain his shelter, and to stay safe from predators. Furthermore, unlike the man in the city, he cannot listen to a George Eliot novel on his iPhone or watch a Luis Bunuel movie from his laptop.

However, these are abstract, philosophical questions which are only peripherally related to this discussion. And the more practical point is this: In general, in a modern society, one can maximize freedom by removing constraints from individual autonomy. If you live in a society that will fine you for writing a book that deals frankly with female sexuality, that is an encroachment on freedom. If you live in a society that will punish you for wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, that is an encroachment on freedom. If you live in a society that will jail you for pursuing a mutually rewarding homosexual relationship, that is an encroachment on freedom.  

PHILO: I don’t think these are peripheral philosophical questions, but let’s leave that to the side for the moment. You touch upon another important complaint of mine against liberalism: Tolerance inevitably metamorphoses into an intolerant demand for celebration. Let’s consider homosexuality. For most of the history of the West, homosexuality was discouraged, and often homosexuals were ridiculed and sometimes punished, especially after the triumph of Christianity. Even in classical Greece, where some forms of homosexuality were tolerated and, dare I say, even celebrated, “passive receivers” were derided for effeminacy and gay marriage was unthinkable. But liberalism, which values tolerance so highly, has argued that this history of discrimination was not one of wisdom, but of benighted bigotry.  And it has contended that homosexuality is a legitimate lifestyle choice and therefore should be accepted without ridicule or moral judgment.

If liberalism ended here, I might disagree, but I would have no serious objection. I do not think homosexual men and women should be prosecuted or pilloried. I merely think they should keep their sexual relationships private. Heterosexuality should be the norm, the ideal, for the obvious reason that only heterosexual unions can result in children. But here is the problem. Once liberalism accepts something, once it tolerates it, it is incapable of preventing it from becoming part of the mainstream. And soon, we are compelled to celebrate what we were merely supposed to tolerate. I can no longer object morally to homosexuality even while refraining from derogating homosexuals; I must celebrate homosexuals (and pansexuals and asexuals, et cetera). And a liberal society cannot make a commonsense distinction between homosexual and heterosexual unions, blessing the latter while discouraging the former.

MEANDER: Before commenting on your specific example, I want to note that your general thesis about tolerance is obviously false. Take, for example, large age gaps in romantic partners. We tolerate this, but we do not celebrate it. In fact, we actively discourage it. Same for vulgarity. We tolerate cursing and blaspheming, but we do not generally celebrate it. Tolerance and openness do not inevitably transform into approval or celebration. Of course, some people demand celebration—but that is not a unique symptom of liberalism. It is a symptom of humanity. No political arrangement would be free from this. To think otherwise is utopianism. And, to further the point, many of your objections to liberalism are, I think, objections to the imperfect rose of reality for not being as beautiful as the ideal rose of the poet’s imagination.

Now, to your specific example, I hesitate to argue that prior moral regimes were bigoted or benighted (with some obvious exceptions). They existed in an environment very different from ours, and they wrestled with challenges we can hardly fathom. War, strife, death—all were much more common. Men needed to be strong and bellicose; and women needed to have many children. Nevertheless, I do think we have made measurable moral progress. And as we have progressed, we have extended rights to groups traditionally excluded from them. In 1850, women could not vote. That strikes me as obviously wrong. And that they can vote today indicates that we are morally superior to our forebears. The same holds for our treatment of homosexuality. This is not, of course, to belittle our forebears. They bequeathed this civilization to us; we see beyond them precisely because we have their foundation to stand upon. To say that we are morally superior, then, is no more insulting to the dead than to say that we are scientifically superior.

PHILO: Moral progress is an egotistic illusion. Morality does not improve. It merely changes. It’s like an organism in a Darwinian world. It adapts, but it does not make progress. The fish is not worse or inferior to the elephant.

MEANDER: Well, that’s an interesting tangent that I’d love to pursue because I believe that evolution is progressive. But I’ll leave that aside.

PHILO: Well, certainly that would be an entertaining conversation—but yes, we’ll leave it for another day. Let me conclude with my final complaint against liberalism, then we can recapitulate our arguments. Liberalism, because of its sacralization of tolerance and freedom, discourages the discrimination and exclusion that are necessary for coalitions to survive. Humans can be exploitative and manipulative creatures. And groups that do not have strict rules and swift punishments for exploiters will be exploited. More importantly, groups that do not have strong barriers to entry will be exploited. Liberalism weakens these barriers—weakens them because it promotes a kind of universal tolerance and weakens them because it objects to identity-based policies. It cannot justify keeping some ethnic groups out while letting others in. And thus, liberal societies are inevitably destroyed by their own weakness and unwillingness to defend themselves from invasion.

MEANDER: This I think is the strongest, most biting argument against modern liberalism, and I confess I have no great answer except to say that liberalism is not necessarily committed to generous, undiscriminating immigration policies. That’s a modern quirk, misunderstanding, failure. For much of the history of the United States, to take one example, immigration policies were explicitly ethnically based.

PHILO: But it’s not a quirk or a misunderstanding, as you put it, it’s a consequence of taking liberal principles such as individualism and universalism seriously. After all, the liberal objects to group-based discrimination inside a society; how can he object to it at the border? No, liberalism vaporizes group boundaries because it sees ethnicity as an irrational, elemental, primitive form of identity to be transcended by the sagacious rulers of modernity. Sure, ordinary people may still wallow in it like pigs in a mud bath of superstition; but the enlightened must reject it.

MEANDER: This strikes me as a fair point. This is a real tension in liberal ideology. But, after admitting that, I would point out that all ideologies are beset by tensions. And I see no reason why a good liberal could not also promote strict immigration policies, even if another liberal could use those very principles to argue for generous immigration policies.

PHILO: That is a fair concession, and I appreciate it. Let us summarize our arguments, then, shall we?

MEANDER: Absolutely.

PHILO: Liberalism has dominated the West since the late 1700s and though challenged from time to time by rivals such as Fascism or Communism, it has prevailed. Some theorists have even contended that it is the ideological end of history. This strikes me as an intellectually piquant but obviously false thesis. At any rate, liberalism in recent years has struggled severely. Populism is burgeoning in many Western countries, and it is not hard to see why. Demographics are shifting rapidly. Whites are demonized. Men can become women; and women can become men. Sexual and moral anarchy prevail. Loneliness and ennui are ubiquitous. People pine for an alternative to the liberal status quo.

During our debate, I raised four major objections to liberalism. First, liberalism overemphasizes the individual and thus dismisses the legitimate interests of the community. Second, it exaggerates the power of reason and thus presumes that people can make good decisions in absence of guidance and constraint. Third, it promotes a kind of tolerance that inevitably transforms into celebration and thus applauds all kinds of sexual and moral perversions. And fourth, it undermines its own ability to keep out cheaters and exploiters and thus is perpetually vulnerable to predators.

Liberalism had a great run. But its time has passed. It will soon be buried like other failed ideologies in the great mausoleum of history. I will not lament this loss. Instead, I will celebrate it. It will free us from our thoughtless deference to liberalism and will allow us to think creatively about our future.

MEANDER: I’ll counter by noting that liberalism, although not perfect, is the best political ideology humans have yet devised. It is coherent, consistent, and persuasive, though, of course, it is not without tensions. It does not idealize humans; it does not heroize reason. Instead, it accepts humans as they are: flawed, fallible, limited creatures, prone to errors and irrational impulses. But it also recognizes that humans are sociable and rational, cooperating to overcome life’s many challenges. One can dwell like an intellectual toad in the depressing slime of human depravity—but that only reverses the error that the pollyannish progressives make. And it offers a tendentious view of humans as pervaded by sin and vice. Humans, in truth, are between beast and angel. And liberalism encourages the latter while recognizing the former.

What is more, the past 300 years of history in the West have witnessed massive moral and technological progress. We no longer burn witches and heretics; we no longer tremble in fear in a thunderstorm; we no longer castrate homosexuals. Of course, progress is not without tradeoffs. Nostalgia may falsely flatter the past, but the things upon which it fixates are often real enough. We no longer believe in the same god or the same sacred order. A shared sense of the common good is unimaginable. These are real but irrevocable losses. Even if liberalism is replaced, they will not return.

PHILO: My hope is that they can.

MEANDER: And my hope is that freedom and individualism continue to flourish.

PHILO: Shell we leave it here?

MEANDER: Sounds good to me. As always, I appreciate the edifying and cordial exchange.

PHILO: Same. Until next time.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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