Why I Lost Interest in the Liberalism Debate

On Science-Fictional Political Theory

Regent Street, London, 2023.

I thought I’d explain briefly why I have recently moved away from writing about the debate over liberalism in political theory and political theology, in which I participated vigorously from about 2017-2021 (for example, here, here, here, here and here). I’ve explained this before, both in print and on “X,” but it might be useful to consolidate and summarize those explanations in one place, if only for the record

In short, the debate is over, and political-liberalism-as-theory lost. It lost not mainly by the force of argument, whatever the merits of the arguments, but by the force of fact, by the development of circumstances. It has become painfully obvious that political-liberalism-as-theory suffers from an insuperable reality gap. It gets almost no purchase on the concrete operation and lived reality of actually existing liberal political orders. Under extant liberalism, the supposed “fact of reasonable pluralism,” which political-liberalism-as-theory takes as an indisputable condition and premise, is nowhere to be seen in the public sphere. That lived reality is far better summarized by the header image of Regent Street than by the pages that are still churned out by professional theorists of political liberalism. As a result, liberal theorists are best understood as working in a genre that bears roughly the same relationship to any actually existing liberal political order as the novels of J.K. Rowling bear to the current United Kingdom. It is really a genre of fantasy or, given the faith of liberal theorists in the future progress of history, science fiction.

By political-liberalism-as-theory, I mean the sort of academic theorizing about political and constitutional liberalism that one sees in recent books by Frank Michelman (critiqued in illuminating terms by Conor Casey in a New Digest post and in a forthcoming review in Constitutional Commentary) and by Kevin Vallier (critiqued in a unanswerable way by Ed Feser), and in a recent paper by Cass Sunstein. These works share the curious feature that they slip and slide rapidly and un-self-consciously between abstract ideal theory on the one hand, and on the other descriptive claims about the pluralism of our actual political order — claims that might perhaps have gotten purchase circa 1975 but that no longer connect to reality. Relatedly, they slip and slide rapidly and un-self-consciously between the aspirational and the empirical, between the essential substance of liberalism and its accidents or inessential features. As the anonymous “Chateaubriand” once observed sarcastically, in the pages of political-liberalism-as-theory “all bad things that happen in non-liberal regimes (historical or hypothetical) are *because of* the lack of Liberalism. All bad things that happen in Liberal regimes are *in spite of* Liberalism.” The theorists of political liberalism, in other words, dismiss the faults of any actually existing liberal regime as aberrations, while always claiming that the faults of nonliberal regimes are inherent and essential - a game on display in all the works of the theorists I have mentioned.

Reality, however, has put an end to the substance-and-accidents game, has broken any connection between the theory of political liberalism and the surrounding political order. The main facts about our lived political order in 2024, brute and overwhelming facts, are twofold. First, the public sphere is dominated by a very particular comprehensive or perfectionist version of liberalism, which is aggressively sacramental and liturgical. Extant liberalism relentlessly frames every policy debate in terms of the value of individual autonomy and an endless project of human liberation from the oppression of unchosen constraints, including constraints of customary morality, natural law and even biology - subject only to an override of “harm” to others, where “harm” has never been well defined and is itself deployed in inconsistent and politically repressive ways. This comprehensive view, the “dictatorship of relativism,” enthusiastically enforces itself by coercive means, by the instruments of the law, repressing any and all competitors. Indeed, the vigorous suppression of alternatives is itself conducted in the very name of “liberation” from oppressive power — which is why, as I have argued, Herbert Marcuse is the intellectual progenitor of our actually existing liberal order, the one who carries John Stuart Mill’s project to its ultimate and logical conclusion.

Second, almost no one in America 2024, barring a few professors and elderly journalists, is really a political liberal in the sense that the theorists advocate. (Casey’s work cited above is excellent on all these points). Both the political left and political right thirst to prosecute their enemies, tremble eagerly in the hope of making their respective comprehensive views the master-view, the dominant view, through the power of the state or the power of quasi-public actors, such as corporations, universities and nongovernmental organizations. In major American universities, in particular, the effective constituency for free speech and reasonable pluralism shrinks by the day, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary; the only real question is which views will be suppressed by which new task force. All this is neither a bad thing, nor a good thing. It is simply a pragmatically inevitable thing, given the persistent and universal human hope to live in a society ordered to truth. Political liberalism, even if possible in principle, simply turned out to be unsustainable as a matter of the deep facts of human anthropology and human psychology. All one can say as a normative matter is that an open recognition and admission that some view or another must hold sway might actually lead to a more temperate and moderate exercise of authority than does the reigning version of comprehensive liberalism, which officially denies its own imperial nature and is thus, on a deep level, unable to comprehend itself. But that is a strictly prudential counsel, one that nonliberal polities have often practiced; it is not any form of liberalism.

To be sure, I maintain my views on the theoretical issues — or rather, as I have been influenced by the work of others on these points, especially the work of Ryszard Legutko, I maintain views that I think are true. I believe that there can be no such thing as liberal pluralism even in principle, because liberal pluralism is, as Legutko explains, just another monism — the special case of monism that relentlessly drives non-liberal comprehensive views from the public sphere, by coercion and the force of law if necessary, including coercion effected indirectly through employment relationships and the structure of the “free” market. (Of course this does not mean that there cannot be a second-best, pragmatic and prudential form of pluralism, rooted in the understanding that, as J.F. Stephen emphasized, it is often unwise to attempt to use the rough instruments of the law to lead citizens and society to true beliefs and virtuous habits, at least not too quickly). I believe with Patrick Deneen that liberalism in general and political liberalism in particular failed because of, not despite, its theoretical commitments. (Here Deneen argues, with every right, on the very terrain of substance-and-accidents chosen by his antagonists). And, finally, while I have for the most part lost interest in these debates, I do not promise never to discuss them again, if and when for example the brilliant political theologian Edmund Waldstein writes about them.

But the main point is that these theoretical debates have no current cash-value, no current practical interest. Consider the claim, often heard from “classical liberals,” that the currently dominant comprehensive liberationist view is best described as “progressivism,” different from True Liberalism, and that what is needed is a renewal of True Liberalism and a rejection of progressivism. To repeat, I think this false, and think that progressivism is just political liberalism taken to its logical conclusion; progressivism is political liberalism that has worked itself pure, that has finally worked out the full consequences of Mill’s and Marcuse’s shared commitment to liberation from human “oppression” and the “distortion” of social cognition by power. But the truth or falsity of these claims is ultimately irrelevant. The fact is that both classical liberalism and political liberalism in the sense defended by the theorists are no longer, if they ever were, in the space of the realistically possible for our actually existing political order, no longer live options. Either we will have the continued and ever-deepening dominance of comprehensive sacramental liberationism (whatever theoretical label best describes it), or we will have a reaction at an equally comprehensive scale, reasserting traditional views about the validity of unchosen moral, political and legal constraints as legitimate constraints on individual and social action. Of course, as should go without saying, such a reassertion will necessarily move forwards, not backwards; it will refresh the fundamental principles of the tradition as applied in new forms, under new labels, and in new ways, non nova sed nove. But whatever happens, what we will not have and what will not persist is the pragmatically unstable combination of principled liberationism and “reasonable” pluralism to which the theorists I have mentioned are committed.

What comes after liberal theory? Non-liberal theory, very much including applied non-liberal theory and applied practical projects, which bear the same relationship to non-liberal theory as applied economics bears to neoclassical economic theory. In my own case, the current main interest is classical legal theory (which, as I have explained a number of times, offers a universal framework; it is a broader and different category than specifically Catholic legal and social theory, a category developed historically and theoretically on different grounds, although the latter is a profoundly impressive body of thought that illuminates the former in all sorts of ways). Other post-liberals have moved on to other applied projects as well. Whether or not one shares this or that applied interest, the debates over high liberal theory that seemed so gripping in recent memory are no longer of much relevance; the world has simply moved on, and the political liberalism of the professional theorists has no place in that new world.