Time for All Liberals to Unite

We need to transcend stale left-right tribal entities and forge a politics based on a commitment to liberal values

Shikha Dalmia, president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and editor-in-chief of The UnPopulist

The following are Shikha Dalmia’s opening remarks today at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference, which has been convened by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. The conference runs July 11–12, 2024.

Thank you all for coming for ISMA’s inaugural conference, Liberalism for the 21st Century. It is extremely gratifying—and encouraging—that the guests here today come not only from all over the U.S. but around the world. Folks have traveled from England, Italy, India, Iran, Bangladesh, Asia, Latin America, and many other countries.

Why have we all made such extraordinary efforts to gather? Well, liberals do know how to throw a good party. Our forefather John Stuart Mill put liberalism on a solid footing when he defended the right of inebriation in his seminal work On Liberty. And God knows we need that right now more than ever.

Many of us sense that we are living in highly volatile times when the future of liberal democracy is on the line. Liberal democracy, the golden child of the Enlightenment, has delivered untold peace, prosperity and moral progress over the last 250 years virtually everywhere it has been embraced. It has defused religious wars and civil strife, liberated those living under arbitrary and brutal feudal hierarchies, and lifted billions and billions from poverty. It is this stunning record that allowed it to vanquish socialism and communism in the late 20th century. Yet now, merely 35 years after the collapse of the Communist Bloc, new ideological challenges are arising from both the left and the right causing much head-turning confusion. No doubt, in the future as in the past, the left and right will continue to take turns for the role of the “primary danger of the age.” There is no way of settling this question in a permanent way but only for our own particular time and place. In that spirit, I would suggest that the primary danger to the liberal regime currently comes from the right.

A world that has lived through Robespierre’s reign of terror can never forget the ease with which the moral fervor of good intentions can go murderously wrong. However, there is at least nothing inherently illiberal about modern progressive ends—whether it is advancing social justice for racial and sexual minorities or protecting the planet. To the contrary, in fact. We demonize such goals at the risk of not only halting—but reversing—our moral progress.

But there are liberal and illiberal means of accomplishing noble ends and our progressive friends need to choose the liberal path. This path may not deliver instant results, but it delivers more enduring ones because it wins hearts and minds as it goes along. And liberal polities, thanks to their insistence on deliberation and due process, offer a sorting mechanism to separate out genuine injustices from fads. They minimize the collateral damage to innocent victims, thereby preventing these causes from losing legitimacy and self-destructing.

The right is deeply upset that progressives today control the commanding heights of cultural institutions. But there are liberal remedies against their excesses—both in the court of law and also through the court of public opinion. Conservatives have already successfully used both to defend religious liberties and freedom of conscience, as David French has convincingly argued.

The right, however, is in a different place altogether. It has catastrophized the threat of the left to justify an open revolt against liberalism and settle its own longstanding discontents and peeves by mustering the iron fist of the state.

Various kinds of extreme reactionary ideas have sprouted in the Western right and congealed under the umbrella of National Conservatism. Admittedly, the NatCon movement has some very smart philosophers and theorists asking probing questions about liberalism that we need to grapple with. If they were simply writing in academic journals instead of providing ammunition for the culture wars, it would be one thing. But beneath all their high political theory, what emerges is a majoritarian identity politics in the form of various kinds of nationalisms—populist nationalism, ethno- and religious nationalism. And their main goal is to protect the status and interests of dominant in-groups while marginalizing minority outgroups—all in the name of fighting the left. One telling sign that the NatCon movement seeks not merely to push back against woke excesses but use them as a pretext to advance an illiberal, majoritarian agenda is that there is little difference between its rhetoric and goals and, say, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism. The progressives Modi is attacking as commies and Naxalites (militant Maoists) aren’t critical race theorists or trans activists demanding gender-affirming care for minors. They are fighting injustices against untouchables, women, and Muslim and Christian minorities although, admittedly, sometimes in a ham-handed way. But if you compare the rhetoric and agenda of Hindu nationalists and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and MAGA politicians, you see that there is not much difference in either kind or degree. Only the groups they target vary.

These challenger ideologies, as I like to call them, have nothing all that new or fresh to offer—they haven’t come up with any new governing arrangements that offer an alternative, let alone a superior one, to liberal democracy. They can’t restart history. But they can only turn back the clock by tapping into majoritarian grievances to challenge liberalism’s commitment to personal liberty, toleration, pluralism, political equality, and the rule of law that holds everyone, even the most powerful person on earth, accountable.

That long-established liberal democracies that have regarded their institutions with complacency, as a settled fact of history, have so quickly come under their sway shows that liberal democracies will always remain fragile no matter how much they deliver. Why is that? Namely, in my opinion, liberalism is not a utopian ideology that promises to solve every human problem. That is Marxism! Nor is it trying to immanentize the eschaton. That’s Christian nationalism! It just tries to do the best with flawed humans driven by a contradictory human nature that wants irreconcilable things. And those humans who aren’t satisfied in the tradeoffs that every liberal society must make are always ready to mount a revolt, spawning challenger ideologies even in the most spectacularly successful liberal democracies.

One reason these challenger ideologies are arguably more dangerous than socialism and communism, liberalism’s defeated foes, is because they are sapping the confidence and legitimacy of liberal democracies from the inside. The external threat of socialism brought the country together, these ideologies are polarizing and dividing it.

It is bad enough that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the self-avowed “illiberal democrat,” is the role model of the neo-right. But what truly boggles the mind is that Vladimir Putin is now considered the true champion of Western Civ. There is a fight between democracy and authoritarianism but it is being waged not so much between two international power blocks but within liberal polities themselves.

Liberal democracies have started to fight back, though. Poland led the way last December when its liberal coalition defeated the Law & Justice Party or PiS after five years of institutional assaults. Last month, Prime Minister Modi saw a narrower than expected victory. This week in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was relegated to the third place although this blood-and-soil party still made major gains and she may yet become president in 2027. The hapless Tories of course had been expected to lose to the Labour Party and they did. But the newly formed, right-wing populist, anti-immigration Reform UK party obtained an impressive share of the vote. Meanwhile, the far-right remains entrenched, even ascendant, in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Israel.

And of course America may well reelect Donald Trump. We’ll hear more about the state of the American right during the next two days, but should Trump return to the Oval Office, it won’t only be a disaster for liberal democracy in America, given his open contempt for its institutions and norms, but also the rest of world. Why? Because as the most eloquent success story of Enlightenment liberalism, America has demonstration effects for everyone else. So if liberalism is not secure here, it may be secure nowhere. Imagine trying to convince Benjamin Netanyahu or Narendra Modi to restrain their religious extremists when Trump is in the White House ordering deportation raids and declaring open season on Muslims.

Ekeing out narrow election victories against the Trumps and Le Pens of the world by mad, last minute political scrambling is better than losing. But only repudiating these regressive nationalisms in the marketplace of ideas will ultimately restore liberalism’s footing. Every election shouldn’t have existential stakes for liberal polities. Vigilance might be the price of liberty, but the need for constant hypervigilance is the sign of a polity in trouble.

So what should we do?

The challenger ideologies have nothing in common beyond the rejection of liberalism. They have diverse, often conflicting, goals. What, after all, do integralists who want a confessional state, communitarians who blame Western individualism for destroying community and breeding alienation, and the Nietzschean Bronze Age Pervert who wants the Übermensch to rule have in common?

Yet they have done a remarkable job of uniting and building a movement around their shared rejection of liberalism. Even as we are hosting our inaugural gathering, NatCons, just a few miles from here, are in their fifth year of convening. And they meet multiple times every year in multiple cities across the world. Clearly, the travails of the working class and high inflation aren’t cutting into their travel budget.

It is time for true liberals to set aside their existing policy disagreements and come together in a renewed defense of core liberal democratic values (personal freedom, openness, pluralism, toleration and human rights) and institutions (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, executive restraint and representative governance). We, after all, have something affirmative, namely liberalism, in common. It should be possible for us to jettison the old and stale left/right divisions and forge a new liberal/illiberal alignment. We need to offer a revitalized intellectual defense of liberalism that points out how life is—to repurpose the phrase of Thomas Hobbes—“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” for people living under illiberal states. And, above all, we need to show how liberalism is the only governing system that can generate workable solutions with broad buy-in for the very problems that are leading its critics to reject it. A commitment to these values, as opposed to tribal identities, will have the great advantage of allowing us to recognize and respond to this threat regardless of which side of the spectrum it emerges.

To begin this task, we have a roster of distinguished—and politically diverse—thinkers who, over the course of the next day and a half, will respond to liberalism’s critics and explain why liberalism, regardless of its geographic origins, is a universally applicable idea. We will discuss electoral reforms to strengthen the foundations of liberal democracies, while seeking responses to such issues as climate change, economic inequality, and social justice. And we will make an affirmative and unapologetic case for liberalism.

© The UnPopulist 2024