“I have remained an old superannuated lover of liberty in an age when almost everyone desires a ruler.” So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in a letter to his godson Alexis Stoffels on January 4, 1856, five years after President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the second French Republic’s short-lived experiment in freedom in 1851 and ushered in the Second Empire.
It was not that Tocqueville thought that illiberalism was overrunning Europe. Thanks to the 1848 Revolutions, liberal constitutionalism had made significant gains across the continent. Market liberal ideas were also undermining the mercantilist arrangements that had dominated Europe for three hundred years. By the late 1850s, Napoleon III himself had started liberalizing France by gradually relaxing press censorship and police surveillance, allowing the legislature to vote on state budgets, and signing a free trade agreement with Britain in 1860.
Beneath the surface, however, Tocqueville saw other illiberal trends underway. As a government minister in 1849, he had been shocked by the traction acquired by socialist ideas among intellectuals and workers, and by the violent schemes for realizing them. Two years later, Tocqueville was appalled by how quickly France’s middle classes abandoned their erstwhile commitment to liberty and supported Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état.
Nor did Tocqueville regard democracy’s emergence as any guarantee of freedom. In Democracy in America, he explained how the passion for equality that leveled hierarchies of birth was also adept at undermining liberty-sustaining habits. Illiberalism, Tocqueville maintained, could emerge within societies that attached a high premium to freedom.
Illiberalism, Left and Right
Our time may be different from Tocqueville’s, but illiberalism is on the march in many societies that claim to value liberal constitutionalism, the rule of law, market economies, private property, and strong civil societies. Sometimes these illiberalisms take on violent form. Witness, for instance, the vile anti-Semitism that has swept Western countries since October 2023. Equally worrying, however, are longer-term trends indicating that freedom is steadily falling down the list of things that people care about.
Across the West, for instance, progressives have backed away from their traditional support for free speech in the name of combating what they call “misinformation” for which, as the legal scholar Patrick M. Garry notes, there is no concrete definition “other than speech with which one disagrees.” The same progressives also regularly give religious liberty short shrift if it obstructs agendas like the advance of gender ideology. Religious organizations and individuals find themselves pressured by government officials, prosecutors, human-rights tribunals, or private legal actions to dilute their adherence to some of their long-standing moral teachings.
Such lawfare is invariably accompanied by attempts by progressives to stigmatize specific views. Expressions of concern about the effects of mass immigration upon social cohesion, for instance, are often decried as racism. Not so long ago, scientists who criticized government responses to Covid were publicly derided as cranks, and private and public actors made attempts to silence and intimidate them. Cancel culture has been applied to a range of people, from researchers who question the human-caused climate change thesis to those who hold that it is seriously wrong to permit biological men to play women’s sports.
Illiberals, enabled by a citizenry that has become indifferent to freedom, will have little difficulty getting around constitutional restraints. The “spirit” underlying “the laws” matters.
As for economic freedom, we are a long way from the days in which center-left figures like Bill Clinton expressed positive views of markets and acknowledged welfare’s downsides. Throughout Europe and America, the left has firmly recommitted itself to demand-side economic management.
Economic policy is where parallel illiberal trends are becoming visible on parts of the right, particularly its nationalist-populist faction. Since 2015, we have witnessed a steady drift towards protectionism and a willingness among some conservatives to entertain using industrial policy, despite the documented failures of such interventions, or even to lend their support to labor unions.
Substantial entitlement and welfare reform are off the political table for right-populists, just as they are for the left. The same populists have joined social conservatives in pushing for the state to extend its reach into the family and civil society in an effort to address particular social questions. This is exemplified by calls to use tax policy to help reverse declining birth rates. Leaving aside such policies’ proven ineffectiveness, they smack of the type of social engineering that conservatives have generally criticized.
These developments, however, pale in comparison to more disturbing changes on the right. One concerns efforts by hardline Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists to instrumentalize religion to realize political ends. These, however, are marginal groups.
More serious is some conservatives’ embrace of a “reward friends and punish enemies” logic derived from Carl Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction developed in his 1932 book, The Concept of the Political. In some cases, this might be interpreted as reflecting desires to respond more forcibly to left illiberals’ attempts via lawfare and cancel culture to pulverize liberties like free speech and religious freedom. In other instances, however, it suggests a worryingly high degree of comfort with a will-to-power rationale that would have baffled the likes of Edmund Burke. Another ominous trend has been the admiration for Vladimir Putin which, until Russia invaded Ukraine, was not hard to find on sections of Europe’s populist right. In America, this is matched by the “Bronze Age Mindset” that expresses disdain for the American Founding, Christianity, women, and migrants.
Not a New World
These developments across the political spectrum are “illiberal” insofar as they reflect a willingness to compromise, or even overturn, key markers of a free society. Before panicking, however, we should recognize that none of these trends are new.
Aspects of today’s illiberal rhetoric mirror sentiments expressed by sections of the left and right in many post-1918 European democracies. This type of demagoguery was invariably accompanied by outright violence. Similarly, just as Putin has had his fans in the West, so too did dictators like Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. Many ruthless authoritarians attracted admiration in interwar Western democracies.
If we fast forward to the 1960s student upheavals, we discover that they too were characterized by deeply illiberal language and actions. This reflected the influence of Marxist discourse among intellectuals and in universities. To that extent, the speech-stifling wokeness that dominates the progressive outlook and has steadily infiltrated government agencies, law firms, schools, and businesses represents continuity with the past.
Even cancel culture has its antecedents. Ostracizing those who hold particular political, cultural, economic, or religious views is not novel. Nor are efforts to deter anyone from supporting canceled individuals. Just as pressures are brought to bear to discourage lawyers today from assisting canceled individuals or defenders of causes like the Second Amendment or traditional marriage, so too were lawyers in the 1950s pressured not to defend individuals subject to blacklisting.
When we turn to today’s media, it is not hard to find the relentless propagation of narratives that denigrate entire segments of the population in liberal democracies. Throughout America’s 2024 elections, many media commentators insisted that half of America was irredeemably sexist, racist, or both.
Certainly, the advent of social media has magnified the vividness and reach of such vilification. But illiberalism of this type on the fourth estate’s part is not a radical departure from the past. Think of the nativist screeds against Irish and German Catholic immigrants that characterized American newspapers in the 1850s, or the anti-Semitic rants of Father Charles Coughlin on his radio broadcasts, listened to by tens of millions of Americans in the 1930s. Nor are today’s histrionic media attacks on public figures’ reputations especially remarkable. One need only look back to late-eighteenth century pamphlets that systematically trashed the character of American Founders like Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and even George Washington.
As for something as important to free societies as economic liberty, it is worth noting that the total top income tax rate in America between 1945 and 1963 was a whopping 90 percent before falling to a “mere” 70 percent between 1965 and 1981. Neither were the highly interventionist economic policies of the New Deal and the Great Society indicative of the deep commitment to free enterprise and private property that typically marks societies that esteem liberty.
Illiberalism Can Triumph
Given this history, it is tempting to adopt a “this too shall pass” approach to illiberalism’s present-day expressions. That, however, would be a mistake. We cannot assume that these attacks on liberty will gradually subside, or that they will not succeed in significantly undermining various safeguards of freedom in ways that could prove difficult to reverse.
Many liberal regimes have succumbed in the past to decidedly illiberal developments. Tocqueville witnessed it in his lifetime. Weimar Germany, once described by the historian William Shirer as possessing “on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had ever seen,” was eventually broken by National Socialism and its nationalist-conservative allies. Italy’s constitutional parliamentary monarchy, dominated by liberal-conservative parties from 1861 onwards, submitted surprisingly quickly to Mussolini’s “March on Rome” following street violence between socialists and fascists. Though he proceeded more slowly, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was successful in dismantling what had been a relatively stable democracy since 1958 and replacing it with an authoritarian left-populist regime.
There are also instances in which illiberalism can acquire an institutional presence within a free society’s political structures. Scholars like Ronald J. Pestritto have illustrated how American progressives’ success in establishing the administrative state in the form of federal agencies and large entitlement programs significantly altered the liberal constitutional arrangements set in place in America between 1776 and 1790. Nor should we forget those instances in which laws legislated primarily by conservatives in the name of national security have compromised Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure and Fifth Amendment protections of due process.
Further complicating matters are the ways in which particular features of democratic culture can lend themselves to substantial erosions of liberty—sometimes without a single law being passed. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville underscored how the sheer power of public opinion in democracies led to far more effective forms of silencing than some of the most rigorous police censorship commonly employed by many nineteenth-century European governments.
Alongside this, Tocqueville envisaged the possibility of people in democratic systems combining the “principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty” and, in return for peace and quiet, allowing “the surface of society” to be populated,
with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
These words foreshadow a world in which democracies have become steadily overladen by laws, regulations, welfare programs, and the bureaucracies that administer them, but which nevertheless hold periodic elections to give citizens the illusion that they remain in charge. The most insidious aspect of such a transformation is that it is all voluntary: free people freely hand much of their liberty to a permanent political class and bureaucracies in return for state-provided security.
I and others have argued that this is the situation that exists in many European Union countries. Elections may be frequent, yet the same mixture of largely social democratic and corporatist policies generally prevails. Occasionally, there are efforts to liberalize specific economic sectors or raise the retirement age by a year or two, but nothing fundamentally changes. The same cast of characters dominate political life, and move back and forth between legislatures, bureaucracies, subsidized industries, and government-funded NGOs at the national and EU level.
Frustration with these circumstances, moreover, is not expressed through parties committed to a limited government understanding of politics or free market economic policies. Instead, the widespread dissatisfaction is channeled through the populist right and hard left: i.e., parties just as committed to interventionist and welfare programs that need bureaucracies to administer them.
You Can’t Fight Illiberalism with Illiberalism
If this accurately describes the state of play in free societies, we must ask: how can we bolster them in the face of twenty-first-century illiberalisms in a world in which any 1990s optimism about the prospects for liberal order dissipated long ago?
In one sense, the solution is simple: we must reinvigorate constitutionalism and the rule of law, liberalize our economies, reinvigorate civil society, and strengthen the values and habits that breathe life into all these things. Alas, there is no simple way to achieve any of these objectives.
For a start, those who benefit from different expressions of illiberalism won’t meekly step aside. To name just a few, they include crony businesses, legislators, lobbyists, and regulators interested in mutual self-enrichment at everyone else’s expense; left- and right-populists who thrive politically off rhetorical excesses; professors who view universities as fora for ideological indoctrination rather than citadels of free inquiry in the pursuit of truth; media organizations populated by journalists who long ago became activists and do not even pretend to be dispassionate commentators; and politicians and public officials who derive immense power from the sheer size of government agencies and the complicated laws they administer.
It can be tempting to regard the acquisition and rigorous use of state power as the primary way to counter these illiberal trends. Why not pass legislation to forbid businesses from promoting woke causes? Shouldn’t the government root out private censors of information? Can’t we just ban political movements bent on subverting prominent features of a free society?
As the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once observed, one way for free people to resist cancel culture is to insist on free speech as sacrosanct. “Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us,” he wrote, “but the only possible solution to them.”
Undoubtedly there are cases in which we have little option but to use government power to combat certain forms of illiberal activity. Obvious examples are criminality, terrorism, or plots to overthrow legitimate governments. But neither is there any reason to tolerate in the name of freedom the actions of environmentalists who deface priceless works of art, efforts by radicalized students to shut down access to lecture halls, or the harassment of Jews by anti-Semites in the streets. The grounds on which such coercion may be legitimately used are impeccably liberal ones: the protection of people’s liberty, property, and lives.
There are also instances in which defending freedom requires governments to act to promote specific policies. A good example would be a government willing to tackle the problem identified by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze in their book Overruled.
The core thesis of Gorsuch and Nitze’s text is that Americans’ political, economic, and civil liberties have been compromised by an explosion in the number of laws and regulations over past decades. Not only does this growth inhibit people’s freedom to act, but it also requires people to interpret and apply such ordinances. That creates endless opportunities for bureaucrats to act in illiberal ways.
If legislators are to reduce the possibilities for government officials to behave in such a manner, they must act to diminish the sheer number of laws and regulations that bureaucracies exist to administer. For example, one way to prevent governments from policing people’s tweets is by diminishing or dispensing with laws that empower governments to direct law enforcement to engage in such activities.
Efforts to shrink state power can create space for independent action by individuals and groups. But, some might argue, the sheer power of social media in our time or the immense sway exercised by major corporations is such that protecting some freedoms may necessitate using government power to, for instance, stop social media companies from censoring statements made on their sites, or formally forbid large businesses from weighing into the culture wars.
There are, however, good reasons to be skeptical about using the state to combat illiberal tendencies. Many problems, for example, arise when state agencies involve themselves in the internal affairs of private organizations in the name of countering illiberal activities.
Suppose, for instance, a government legislates to stop privately-owned companies from promoting various woke causes through means like DEI hiring practices or participating in exercises in cancel culture. Such legislation might inhibit illiberalism’s advance, but it also conflicts with principles of free expression and freedom of association typically valued by free societies. Moreover, it would create a precedent for other governments, perhaps sympathetic to woke (or, conversely, ethno-nationalist) causes, to curb other private associations’ rightful autonomy for their own ideological reasons. In other words, once you allow the state to circumscribe one private association’s freedom in the name of combatting illiberalism, you open the door to governments infringing unduly on other private associations’ freedoms on illiberal grounds.
Does this concern for liberty leave people defenseless against groups like woke capitalists or university administrators unwilling to stop the intimidation of students on college campuses? By no means. There are ways to counter illiberal behavior, as can be seen in cases like the 2023 consumer backlash against Bud Light, or the fierce reaction of alumni and donors to universities’ failures to stop the bullying of Jews and prevent the interruption of classes by left-illiberals throughout 2024. By exercising their freedom to not purchase certain products, or choosing not to make multi-million-dollar donations to colleges, or bringing private legal actions against publicly-traded corporations, free citizens can effectively check DEI and ESG-enamoured CEOs or delinquent university officials without embracing the mindset and methods of illiberals.
Checks, Balances, and Civil Society
The case of private associations underscores the complexities involved in addressing illiberal behavior as well as the risks associated with using government to do so. The good news is that twenty-first-century societies that aspire to be free are not the first to wrestle with such problems or produce solutions.
Here eighteenth-century liberal thinkers like Montesquieu and key American Founders provide us with timeless guidance. In The Spirit of the Laws’ most famous chapter, “On the Constitution of England,” Montesquieu considered what type of political architecture lent itself to securing liberty. For Montesquieu, there can be no liberty without the separation of powers between the executive, legislature, and judiciary. The more they check each other, the greater the likelihood that they can prevent each other from acting illiberally. Any state in which all three branches are combined, Montesquieu held, was by definition despotic.
America’s Founders did not opt for a rigid separation in the Constitution ratified in 1791. In Federalist Papers Nos. 47–51, it is presented as a partial separation of powers insofar as all three branches 1) check and balance each other’s exercise of its power and 2) participate in the exercise of the other branches’ powers. Nevertheless, the objective is the same as Montesquieu’s: to protect liberty via divided government. In the case of America and other liberal democracies like Germany and Australia, this is complemented by federalist structures designed to decentralize power and create another potential barrier to overmighty government.
Reviving and reinforcing this constitutional logic and practice would go a long way towards protecting free societies from illiberals of left and right anxious to exercise untrammeled power today. It is simply much harder for illiberals to enlist the state’s full coercive powers behind their agendas when no one can establish complete dominance of the government’s apparatus.
Montesquieu, however, was much more than a constitutional theorist. He dwelt at length on the moral and social conditions that would incline people to resist trends that led to tyranny. The separation of powers is of little use if people do not assign high value to liberty in the political, social, and economic realms. Illiberals, enabled by a citizenry that has become indifferent to freedom, will have little difficulty getting around constitutional restraints. The “spirit” underlying “the laws” matters.
A close student of Montesquieu, Tocqueville understood this point better than anyone in his time and, perhaps, ours. This emerges when he contemplates what threats to liberty might arise in the future.
“The despotism,” wrote Tocqueville in Democracy in America, “that I fear for the generations to come has no precedent in the world and lacks a name. I will call it administrative despotism for lack of anything better.” In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville illustrated how such power had become steadily centralized in France long before 1789, achieving institutional form in a state bureaucracy cemented into place by the French Revolution. The people increasingly looked to this state apparatus, expecting it to address their problems and meet their needs.
As noted, part of the solution is to reduce the number and scope of the laws and regulations that provide such bureaucracies with power and promote the illusion that the state can solve everyone’s problems. That, however, is only part of the story. Humans indeed have many needs, but not all can be exclusively addressed either by the government or by the prosperity delivered by free markets.
Tocqueville, however, witnessed an America in which these challenges were addressed from below, without dependence upon administrative agencies. As he observed,
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.
Underlying this habit of free association in America, Tocqueville stated, was a common morality rooted in Christianity and informed by moderate Enlightenment and classical thought. This generated norms which encouraged people to link their liberty freely to the performance of what Tocqueville called “social obligations,” without being cajoled by governments to do so. This obviated the need for extensive bureaucracies whose imperative quickly becomes control and their own power—a priority, it turns out, shared by illiberals of all political stripes.
Difficult Choices
Tocqueville’s attention to the norms that sustain people’s freedom and the institutions that support it is at once salutary and dispiriting for supporters of free societies today. On the one hand, his analysis reminds us how critical these norms are for inoculating free societies against illiberal temptations. But it also reminds us that many of the cultural preconditions needed to sustain free societies are presently fragile or under significant strain.
Today, for instance, the habit of free association is weak in America, and so are the institutions of civil society to which this habit gives rise. The problem is dramatically worse in Europe and other Western societies. Nor is there anything like the relative consensus on moral questions that existed in liberal democracies not so long ago, which helped associate freedom with a sense of social obligation. That breakdown owes something to religion’s weaker influence in these countries. Making matters worse is how politics and political ideologies have become a substitute religion for many people, and the harsh illiberalism that inevitably flows from any attempt to immanentize the eschaton.
Restoring respect for and adherence to the constitutional structures indispensable for free societies will be extremely difficult. Persuading politicians who circumvent constitutional protections to secure deeply desired (even good) outcomes can be hard, especially if they know that their political opponents have not hesitated to undermine or ignore those same constitutional norms to realize their own objectives.
Even persuading people that they should see some of their key liberties—economic freedom, free speech, religious liberty, freedom of association, and their constitutional protections, etc.—as tools for combatting illiberalism can be tough. As the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once observed, one way for free people to resist cancel culture is to insist on free speech as sacrosanct. “Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us,” he wrote, “but the only possible solution to them.”
To speak freely, however, against illiberalism—whether it comes from left- or right-populists, woke activists, or ethno-nationalists—requires immense self-confidence. Scruton had that quality, but it also requires immense courage because, as Scruton discovered on numerous occasions, the cost of speaking can be high in a world in which illiberals see themselves at war with anyone who questions their ends or methods. Not everyone has the bravery of a Jay Bhattacharya in Covid America in 2020 or a Wilhelm Röpke in Germany in 1933.
In the end, pointing out such truths may well be the fate of the lonely “lover of liberty,” as Tocqueville described himself in 1856, in our time. There is no magic key that will suddenly revive a dynamic civil society capable of instilling the habits needed for liberty. Nor can commitments to liberal constitutionalism or economic freedom be instantaneously conjured up in societies in which constitutions have become regarded as mere grids for acquiring power, or which have sacrificed vast amounts of economic liberty to allow governments to engage in widespread social and economic engineering.
But whoever thought that maintaining free societies was easy? For most of history, liberty has been severely contested. There never has been, and never will be, a perfectly free political order. “True friends of liberty,” as Tocqueville described them, have faced formidable challenges in the past but nevertheless won through, and without succumbing to illiberal attitudes and tactics. It is not beyond us to do the same.
