Tag: liberalism

Autocracy Threatens When the Two Can’t Come Together.

One of the principal conceits of liberalism—the political doctrine, not the agenda—is that it places great faith in human reason and rationality. Yet if humans are so rational, why then does liberalism seek to curb the collective power of humans?

In his new book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, political theorist William A. Galston explains that when using the term “liberal democracy,” the antithesis of liberal is not conservative, but “total.” Liberal democracy means “limited democracy, a form of government in which the power of democratic majorities is limited in multiple ways.”

To restrain democratic majorities, liberalism reserves for itself the power not only to establish the rules of the game—as in the case of the U.S. Constitution—but also to set the boundaries of political action and public debate. By establishing the limits within which debate can occur and the norms under which it is discussed, liberalism can take certain political topics off the table, determine the language used when permitted subjects are discussed, and otherwise frame whatever matter to which the public is ultimately asked to give its consent.

For most of its short history, liberalism also sought to limit government in the interest of increasing the sphere of individual or group freedom. Limiting government power, particularly in the realm of culture and morality, allowed for a variety of incompatible minority worldviews to coexist more or less peacefully under a—more or less—morally neutral state.

This type of modus vivendi liberalism worked well—particularly for minorities—and, in the western world, often triumphed against more insular, parochial power bases. But with those triumphs, particularly in the United States, a more assertive liberalism began to drop its goal of governmental neutrality and insert itself in the private sphere, the very realm it once sought to keep separate.

Arguing that the “personal is political,” political liberals began to use the government that they had once hoped to be neutral to actively reconstitute family, gender and sexual norms. Once liberalism invaded the private realm, it brought with it its rules of engagement, its right to set the boundaries of debate, even determine the language we use.

While regulating racial speech in the public square was normalized rather quickly and considered successful, the monitoring of more intimate speech and behaviors in the private realm was always more problematic. Historically, the relative neutrality of a secular liberal state allowed traditional religions to operate unimpeded. But once the secular liberal state began to espouse secular liberalism as the preferred universal norm for all citizens it placed the state in opposition to the beliefs and behaviors of many religions. A political doctrine that first emerged as a call to curb the abuse of power evolved into a full on dispensation, or even, as one enthusiastic scholar recently called it, “a way of life.”¹

Today’s surge of populism is the democratic reaction against the growth of liberal agenda setting in what was once considered the private sphere. What began as the establishment of the rules of the game of public life devolved into proscriptions on speech and behavior in everyday life.

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I have to say upfront that I found an eminent political theorist needing to argue that humans are not always driven by reason and self interest a bit sad. (At one point, Galston himself acknowledges that he finds is “almost embarrassing.”) That he felt the need to cite the likes of Aristotle and Thucydides to prove the point also made it a little ridiculous. The book’s second major point, that “persuasive speech” is the core of politics, is also painfully obvious. What is fascinating, however, is the extent to which he felt the need to throw himself at the altar of common sense.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. Liberal democracy, Galston writes, is currently under the most pervasive attack than at any time since the 1930s. Yet, despite the “gathering strength of its external enemies,” this form of government is still “more likely to perish from within—from public dissatisfaction with its vulnerabilities, from demagogues’ ability to mobilize popular passions against it, and most of all, from the myopia and naïveté of its defenders.” In other words, those who adhere to liberalism have helped to bring this moment upon themselves.

A combination of their “unrealistic understanding” of human psychology and their naive belief that the movement toward tolerance at home and abroad was inexorable has provoked a far reaching negative reaction against liberalism as well as rendered liberals incapable of defending themselves against it.

If liberal democracy is to survive, Galston argues, its defenders “must set aside their illusions about human nature and history” and drop their “mistaken faith in historical progress.” That’s because “the dark side of our nature is here to stay, and liberal democracy” . . . “can buckle under pressure from the passions. Noble dreams have their place, but rigorous realism offers the best defense against the threats we now face.”

This adjustment of assumptions, however major, seems pretty straightforward until you realize that one’s baseline assumptions about human nature and history deeply influence whatever political objectives liberalism will seek to achieve on the ground.

The person who believes that people are essentially reasonable and make decisions largely on the basis of their self interest is more likely to place his faith in the type of utopian political goals that seek to remold and reinvent human nature. Conversely, liberals who have witnessed great political evil tend to be more pessimistic about the nature of man and therefore more suspicious of utopian goals to mettle with his nature. Pessimistic liberals, to borrow from philosopher Hans Jonas, should “give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.”²

But is liberalism stripped of its optimism still liberalism? Yes, if you believe that the historical core of liberalism is the distrust of power and a broad commitment to protect individual autonomy.

Is liberalism stripped of its optimism worthwhile? Not entirely if one believes that liberalism should place its faith in the perfectibility of man.

The point here, once again, is that one’s assumptions about the essential nature of humans predetermines how ambitious one thinks political liberalism should be in the cause of freedom. Put another way, how the broader public assesses human nature predetermines how much “change”—to use that lazy, loaded term—it is willing to tolerate.

Lest he fall prey to critics who believe that pessimistic liberalism undercuts calls for transformative change,³ Galston threads the needle and insists that “realism about the dark side of the human soul does not rule out an aspirational liberal politics.” After all, he reminds us, Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who “was hardly naive about human motivation,” was the architect of the Great Society.

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In addition to never forgetting that humans are often driven by irrational, negative emotions, realism, Galston insists, calls for liberals to acknowledge that “human beings bring themselves in full to politics.”

As I stated up top, liberalism restrains majorities and constrains debate. One of those constraints came to include the expectation that people refrain from bringing their religious beliefs into the public square. Galston, however, now concludes that liberals have often underestimated “the persistent power” of religion. He concedes that “culture and religion will not lose their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action.” Thus, if liberals don’t want to “continue to be surprised by political events,” they had better “make the effort to understand the enduring influence of religion and traditional morality in the hinterlands.” If nothing else, it may help them understand how “the exercise of liberty shades over into what many see as license or outright moral anarchy.”

In the end, Galston never clearly states what kind of political objectives a realistic liberalism would seek to promote. He only implies that cultural issues are their weak flank, the place where angry populists hit the hardest and most effectively. “They advance their cause by battling their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture,” he writes, “invoking traditional gender roles and moving such issues as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism to the front lines of the struggle. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds but also because immigrants can challenge, and eventually change, long-established cultural traditions.” What Galston is hinting at, but never dares utter, is the question lurking beneath this important yet imperfect book: How much toleration will the public tolerate?

Galston delivers many sophisticated kernels of truth that can ultimately be boiled down into common sense lessons one would hope a child would learn on a playground. “People can be mean.” “You can’t win ‘em all.” “The world isn’t fair.” “Pick your battles.” You don’t have to read Saint Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr to reach these conclusions. What’s astonishing is that it took Galston until 2025 to pull the alarm.

I say that, because the late social critic Christopher Lasch made the same argument way back in 1991, long before the attack on liberal democracy had become so severe. Lasch warned liberals that “in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable” in lower-middle-class culture, evils “such as “racism, nativism and anti-intellectualism,” they had “lost sight of what is valuable” in it, namely its “moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, [and] its skepticism of progress.”⁴

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Political scientist Giovanni Sartori understood the relationship between liberalism and democracy in terms of geometry. “Liberalism has a vertical impetus,” he wrote, “while democracy is a horizontal diffusion.”⁵ Although liberalism first emerged in the 18th century in opposition to the established powers of aristocracy and the Church, it nevertheless retained the view of “ethical truth as a universal norm linked in a hierarchical chain of increasing purity.”⁶

Liberalism, in other words, is high-minded and tends toward elitism because its ideals are generally interpreted, taught, and monitored by enlightened elites. (John Stuart Mill suggested that liberal democracy required “philosophers” to “enlighten the multitude.”)⁷

But because democracy is about public opinion and participation, it tends toward the parochial and the visceral. The multitude can be anarchic. While liberalism uplifts, democracy levels. Each puts constraints on the other.

For liberal democracy to work, the former and the latter have to meet at some point to form an axis. It’s when the union between the two breaks that autocracy is most likely to threaten the entire enterprise.

Galston is right, “liberal democracy is the best form of government possible in our current circumstances.” Liberalism without democracy becomes elitist. Democracy without liberalism lacks foundational ideals. If realists don’t soon wrest liberalism from the hands of naive utopian-minded optimists, we may not be able to enjoy the benefits of the combination much longer.

Liberals can either continue to castigate the public for its intolerance and backwardness—thereby alienating them further—or the political demands of liberalism can be brought more into line with what the public is willing to tolerate.

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1. Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2024). ↩︎
2. Hans Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), x.
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3. Samuel Moyn. Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023). ↩︎
4. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 17. ↩︎
5. Giovanni Sartori, Elementi di Teoria Politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), 145-146. ↩︎
6. Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1994), 85. ↩︎
7. G.L. Williams, ed., John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (London: Harvester, 1976), 184. ↩︎