The Decline of Liberalism

Arguing over the causes

The decline of liberalism is becoming a “well-squeezed orange” in several of the Substacks that I follow. Why are free institutions under assault?

Erik Torenberg offers this description of liberalism:

The great problem in society is how you deal with conflict. We use markets to determine who has economic resources. We use democracy to determine who has political power. And we use science to determine who has truth.

I could quibble with these sentences. For example, I would say that we use the scientific method to determine who has truth. But Torenberg’s account will do.

That liberalism is under attack seems evident. Free markets? “Neoliberal” has become an epithet. Populists on both sides see malevolence in globalization, information technology, and large corporations.

For democracy to work, you need to respect the other side. You need to be able to lose gracefully. You need to win magnanimously, aware that you might lose the next round. Today instead we approach politics today with a “winner take all” mindset, in which we catastrophize about the possibility of losing an election and use a narrow victory to cram through major policies on party-line votes.

The scientific method rests on free inquiry and norms of excellence. But now academics are using political preferences to skew conclusions. They have taboos that erect barriers against studying certain topics. They decry rigor as racist.

Why now? What is it about 21st-century America that finds liberalism threatened?

At the end of his essay, Torenberg points to economic inequality.

The real reason liberalism is susceptible to illiberalism is because liberalism tries to achieve both freedom and equity and ends up sacrificing the former to try to achieve the latter. Freedom and equity are inherent tension, you can only optimize along one of these dimensions. Figuring out the efficient frontier is the task for societies that want to avoid the problems stemming from being too unbalanced on one side or the other.

I did not find this convincing, in part because nothing earlier in the essay laid the groundwork for it.

In another recent essay, Brink Lindsey writes,

It is not out of bounds to spy the shadows of despotism in our current top-heavy social structure: there is too much power concentrated in elites, there is too little capacity for self-direction and initiative outside the elite, and as a result human potential is being squandered on a massive scale.

As he tells the story: once upon a time, Americans were in an environment that promoted self-government. We were independent farmers and tradesmen. Local elections meant more to us than what happened in Washington. We had a thick set of civil society associations. But as society became more complex, a layer of technocratic managers took over. We became wage-slaves. Government became more remote. Civil society withered.

I will grant that these developments took place. Over the past 200 years, the complexity and scale of business and government have increased dramatically.

Lindsey relates his views to those of some contemporary conservatives.

Let me refer now to a trio of writers whom I consider to be among the most thoughtful and insightful observers on the political right today: Tanner Greer, Matthew Crawford, and N.S. Lyons.

…I believe that their critique of contemporary society carries real weight. It is not out of bounds to spy the shadows of despotism in our current top-heavy social structure: there is too much power concentrated in elites, there is too little capacity for self-direction and initiative outside the elite, and as a result human potential is being squandered on a massive scale.

Lindsey only briefly alludes to what I think of as the New Right viewpoint. I would say that the New Right’s diagnosis of the decline of liberalism is that it is inherently vulnerable to being captured by the alien ideology of the far left. The New Right looks at the political beliefs that predominate in academia, Hollywood, K-12 education, and the Federal bureaucracy as demonstrating that the Left has successfully completed the “long march through the institutions” prophesied by Marxists like Antonio Gramsci.

Lindsey and I reject the solutions proposed by the New Right, which Lindsey terms “post-liberal radicalism.” The New Right does not appear to desire a return to liberalism. To the extent that intellectuals on the New Right articulate a vision, it comes across to me as pre-Enlightment illiberalism. For example, some on the New Right would tear down the barrier between church and state.

But I think that Lindsey is wrong to dismiss the significance of extreme progressive ideology. I think that a liberal society is vulnerable to a loss of status of liberal elites. Nobody is perfect, but I think that many of our institutions were better before the Midwits took over, and DEI replaced competence as a status booster.

True liberalism is not a natural belief system. The natural belief system is “freedom for me, but not for thee.” People easily succumb to Fear Of Others’ Liberty (FOOL). In America, the high status of our Founding Fathers, who held liberal beliefs, helped us to stave off the FOOLs.

But we are in the process of dismantling the status hierarchy in which liberals were at the top. White males stand in disrepute. The new winners in this status war are Midwit FOOLs. The challenge for liberals is to reverse this trend.

Some conservatives place their hope in what I call Rufoism, the use of the political process to try to drive back the progressive assault. I am skeptical that this strategy is sufficient. I think we need to be much more explicit about whose status we are trying to raise and whose status we are trying to lower.

Substacks referenced above:

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Life under "an immense and tutelary power"

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The case for and against Liberalism