Liberalism vs. the New Right

Emily Chamlee-Wright argues for liberalism

Emily Chamlee-Wright sees liberalism being attacked by intellectuals on the right.

Among this cast of influencers are self-described postliberals, Catholic integralists, common good constitutionalists, and nationalist conservatives.

If you want specific examples, just look at the list of thinkers who JD Vance admires.

Wright dubs these thinker “post-liberal intellectuals,” or PLI.

Admittedly, the PLI is a diffuse crowd, with competing platforms and occasional infighting reminiscent of a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Despite their differences, however, the PLI is united by a single, overarching belief: The constitutionally constrained liberal democratic order is the source of everything that is wrong in the world. 

The list of grievances is long. Liberalism’s blind faith in individual liberty and autonomy, they argue, has devastated community and family life by pulling people away from their hometowns, delaying marriage and family formation, and making divorce too easy. Liberalism’s permissiveness has corrupted and stupefied America’s youth, compromised women’s traditional place within society, denigrated the moral status of masculine virtues, and degraded American culture through immigration from the developing world.

Most prominent is the movement’s forthright rejection of progress, which, they argue, has devastated the working class, fueled tyrannical corporate power, and sacrificed American economic interests at the altar of global trade.

Chamlee-Wright’s defense of liberalism focuses on a liberal society’s capacity to self-correct. This is my preferred defense of the market. That is, at any one point in time, we can observe sub-optimal outcomes, labeled as market failures. But the dynamics of the market are such that innovation and competition eventually overcome problems and take care of market failures.

A system for experimentation and learning

She writes,

If we are to fully “get liberalism,” we have to see it as a coherent system that allows for experimentation and learning. And this means that occasionally we need to pull back the lens to see how its principal domains—political, economic, intellectual, and civic freedoms—work together.

She spells out these domains of liberalism.

The most familiar corner of the liberal project, political liberalism, emphasizes the institutional rules of the social and political game. Liberal rules constrain government power, check the power of majorities, ensure procedural fairness, and protect individual and minority rights.

Clearly, without political liberalism, other forms of liberalism are not going to be sustained. In general, she says, the forms of liberalism reinforce one another.

Economic liberalism affords people the freedom to openly innovate, produce, collaborate, compete, and exchange with others in their commercial lives.

Although she does not cite Milton Friedman, he argued in Capitalism and Freedom that economic freedom is necessary for other forms of freedom. A government that will not allow you to engage in voluntary exchange has to impose a strict regulatory apparatus. It must also take away you political, civic, and intellectual freedom.

In the intellectual realm, freedom means

free and open exchange of ideas, scientific experimentation, and creative endeavor

Clearly, intellectual freedom is required for social progress. So is civic freedom, which allows people to associate with one another to help society improve.

As imperfectly liberal as the American founding was, the political freedoms that did exist—freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly (at least for some)—were key inspirations for emancipatory social movements that gained momentum through the essays, publications, oratory, and activism of leading abolitionists, and later, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights leaders.

…If there is a secret sauce that drives this learning, its primary ingredient is contestation.

The advantage of a liberal society is that each of its domains is contestable. Political authority must be earned, primarily through elections, and it is limited by constitutional norms. Economic success is determined by competition. Intellectual issues are subject to debate. Civil associations engage in both cooperation and competition.

The New Right disapproves.

But all this contestability, experimentation, and adaptation is precisely what the PLI want to avoid. It’s the whirling openness of liberal societies, they argue, that renders us victims of social and economic progress.

To drive these points home, PLI critiques often deploy freeze-frame storytelling. These freeze-frame narratives point to something bad happening in the world, tie that bad thing to liberalism’s fondness for individual liberty, and then propose a top-down fix (if they propose a fix at all).

Again, the liberal counter-argument emphasizes the dynamic process of self-correction.

liberals ought to ask, “In which system will we have the best prospects of solving the problem?” Freezeframe storytelling, intentionally or not, has the effect of foreclosing this line of questioning, and keeps us from understanding liberalism as a system that fosters learning.

The liberal promise is not that bad stuff doesn’t happen. Liberalism doesn’t promise that there won’t be economic or social disruption. What it promises is that with liberal norms and institutions in place, free people tend to find solutions. But when we reject liberal principles, workable solutions are much less likely to be found.

In economics, I like to say “Markets fail. Use markets.” More broadly, she is saying “Liberalism fails. Use liberalism.” It is important for people to at least understand this view of society as a dynamic process, rather than adopt a freeze-frame narrative.

How might a PLI reply?

I think that a PLI could reply that the dynamics are working poorly. In some realms, things get worse continually. This could be true of sexual behavior, intellectual inquiry, or the economic state of the working class. A PLI would argue that there are bad trends in these realms, and liberalism has no mechanism for stopping these trends. Society needs binding forces, and liberalism undermines these binding forces, such as religion and social norms.

As a rejoinder, I would say that we then have to ask whether or not government intervention is the solution. As someone on the liberal side of the argument, I am very skeptical that government intervention is the solution for troublesome social trends. Instead, I think we have to allow individuals and groups to adapt to technological and economic change. Decentralized trial-and-error is still a better approach than top-down direction.

I cannot prove conclusively that the decentralized approach is better. But I read history as supporting that view.

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How Liberal Societies Learn