The End of the Even Playing Field?

Remarks delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC.

Let me begin my remarks by stating that I don’t believe in the concept or reality of “late liberalism.” The “lateness” in this phrase illustrates the habit of characterizing what are often transitional periods as late.  By now this labeling practice has gone viral. Historians and journalists indiscriminately apply the designation “late” to what needs a more accurate contextualization. “Late” as an historical classification often signifies that something new is happening that we can’t fully identify in the form in which it appears.

But I’ve another, less academic reason for rejecting the term “late liberalism,” and it is fully explained in my work After Liberalism. Through much of the 20th century, Anglo-American societies have applied “liberal” to describe distinctly illiberal activities, like building administrative states that aimed at reconstructing the family or allowing government bureaucrats to redistribute our earnings. This increasingly elastic use of “liberal” started primarily among social and welfare state democrats more than a century ago, and this practice shows no signs of going away. The same label has been stretched to cover a wide range of projects, like destroying gender identities, degrading white people, and mutilating the bodies of minors through “gender-affirming surgery.”

All such perverse initiatives are now described as “liberal” because this operative term, so argues my work After Liberalism, has become “unbounded” as to meaning. “Liberal” is something we’re supposed to applaud; therefore since at least the Progressive Era in the U.S., anything that social reformers have tried to implement is called “liberal” and traced back to Thomas Jefferson, or perhaps now Barack Obama. The prominent early 20th-century educator John Dewey managed to give socialist experiments a catchy label by calling them “liberal.” He thereby distinguished between his liberalism and the older, supposedly outmoded form of a supposedly related body of ideas. Apparently, Dewey’s transmogrified “liberalism” was truly liberal because it was more about equality than the liberalism it replaced.

More recently we’ve had other enthusiastic claimants to “liberalism.”  There are “classical liberals,” also known as libertarians, and those who view themselves as liberal because they are demanding more open academic discussion. We also have progressive zealots who insist, as did John Stuart Mill and John Dewey in earlier times, that they are perfecting liberal thought. They are carrying this heirloom to enlightened conclusions that less tolerant and less perfect liberals in the past were hesitant to embrace. Our self-proclaimed liberals, who have colonized our media and universities, are now seeking in the name of “liberalism” to punish white male Christians. What is sometimes called reverse discrimination is supposed to bring forth a society of equals in which liberal ideas can finally be practiced on a supposedly level playing field.

Liberalism has a historic context, and it was shaped by social, moral, and material circumstances. It was first of all the idea of the bourgeoisie, which became embodied in concrete institutions and relationships. It was not the imperfect beginning of later leftist experiments or the preferred values of intellectuals who are hoping to fine-tune earlier leftist advances. Liberalism once had a cohesive identity. Liberals, for example, generally favored limited suffrages that excluded women and non-property-holders. But they didn’t take that position because they weren’t fully liberal. They did so because they were seeking what was then a recognized liberal good, accountable government, while trying not to produce an excessively large franchise, which might result in property confiscation and political tyranny. In any case, these authentic liberals believed that only the educated and propertied could muster the necessary discipline to allow constitutional government to function. 

Although liberals viewed women as having human dignity and certainly not as chattel, they continued to believe in the value of traditional gender distinctions, a view that led them to hold fast to the idea that women should, save for some exceptions, be homemakers, not politically engaged. One might disagree with these positions, but those who held them did not cease to be liberal because they espoused them. True historical liberals also favored academic freedom and debating political differences but placed limits on how far they would carry their freedom principles. For example, they had a strong sense of social decency and didn’t believe that political discussion should lead to violence or insulting conduct. Liberals carried with them a heritage rooted in the Bible, classical sources, and an ingrained code of social behavior.

Mind you, I’m certainly not saying that nothing in the liberal heritage can be meaningfully defended in a postliberal age. What I am suggesting is that this excavation work becomes increasingly difficult as one moves beyond the institutions and world of thought that gave birth to a liberal order.  And we should be on guard against exaggerating the extent of the victories we’ve achieved in trying to uphold liberal ideals in a postliberal society. 

A more relevant issue than who can appropriate the “liberal” label at this time is what can be done to protect us from woke totalitarians. This is an urgent question of survival for all decent people in Western societies as we are dealing with a Left that is drunk with power.  Edmund Burke’s “Letter on the Regicide Peace” provides this sober warning about the iconoclastic mindset:

In their culture (meaning that of Jacobins) it is a rule always to graft virtues on vices. They think everything unworthy of the name of publick virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private. All their new institutions, (and with them everything is new,) strike at the root of our social nature.

Precisely because the contemporary Left, even more than the Jacobins whom Burke excoriated,” strike at the root of our social nature,” it may be necessary to organize effectively against them. But we are not advancing that effort by imagining that we are still in a liberal society and are rebuilding its institutions.  We no longer inhabit that world nor enjoy that option.

Counting on civility and fair play from our opponents is an utterly naïve assumption. LGBT enthusiasts, who have both state and media winds at their backs, are delighted to violate the one-time guaranteed rights of those who resist them. And this culturally radical Left couldn’t care less about what a white heterosexual once said in what they regard as the Stone Age about tolerance and reason. Leftist organizers in western countries now call on mercenary mobs to do their bidding, while state administrators turn their backs on the ensuing violence, and the mainstream media blame such “incidents” on religious fanatics and white nationalists. In any case, I see less and less of a liberal aspect, even a vestigial one, in what some might choose to call late liberalism.

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