Liberalism Is in Danger – Helen Dale

Just before the outbreak of war in 1939, the UK’s Ministry of Information—aware, like many Britons, of what was coming down the pike—designed and printed three posters to raise morale in the event of a major disaster. At the time, the possibility of attacks using poison gas was as feared as conventional aerial bombardment, whence widespread images of schoolchildren being issued with gas masks.

At the time, Freedom is in Peril, Defend it with All Your Might was best known of the three, in part because the (now) most famous one—Keep Calm and Carry On—was never released. Less well known is that the Ministry scrapped the entire campaign in October 1939. Feedback had revealed that many ordinary members of the public found the posters patronising and divisive. Art historian Susannah Walker once described the whole business as “a resounding failure,” noting that the posters were worked up by upper-class civil servants who failed to understand the very people they were trying to motivate.

Sound familiar?

These days, liberalism is in peril, and people across the European Union and wider Anglosphere are similarly disinclined to defend it with all their might. This is in part due to how it’s become wedded to establishment sensibilities, rather like the posters that failed to launch. As with the wartime Ministry of Information, an entire political ideology—arguably the most impressive of all ideologies, thanks to its economic successes coupled with avoiding the genocidal behaviour characteristic of its main rivals—has badly lost its way.

When called upon to explain how this has come about—last month, at an event held by Edinburgh’s Adam Smith Museum—I used a principle drawn from the rules of evidence in various jurisdictions, both common law and civilian: falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. This translates, reasonably idiomatically, into “false in one thing, therefore false in all.” It arises when counsel puts a witness in the box and he lies about a fact in issue or relevant evidence around it, typically under pressure of cross-examination. This has the effect of casting everything else he says into doubt, although the rule is not irrebuttable. It just means the side for which he’s appearing must work much harder to restore his lost credit.

Liberalism, like our hypothetical witness—and for a range of reasons—has told a great many lies or at least acquiesced when adherents of other political ideologies have lied. I do take Andrew Doyle’s point—made in his latest book, The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution—that many of these lies did not originate with liberalism (although some did). The same evidentiary rule also has theological applications. Here, it suggests that when an ethical or religious system has an untruth at its heart, its wider social ramifications are also likely to be false and destructive. It’s akin to Helen Joyce’s observation that if you define 1=0 in a mathematical proof, you break everything and prove nothing. In other words, if you’re wrong about something significant, people are allowed to ask what else are you wrong about?

That’s the reason liberals are struggling to get a hearing on free trade.

The End of Woke is an extraordinary compendium of flim-flam—at one point Doyle admits that “it would make a decent doorstop”—but had he decided to provide a complete catalogue of the nonsense put about over the last two decades, it would run to several volumes. He’s also careful to define liberalism capaciously enough that it takes in left or “social” liberals like, say, Steven Pinker or Tony Blair, right or “classical” liberals like Margaret Thatcher or F. A. Hayek, and centrist liberals like Jonathan Rauch or Helen Joyce. This has the effect of exposing precisely when a bit of contemporary nonsense has genuine liberal roots and when it emerges from other ideological traditions.

Liberals are often unfair to liberalism’s critics or blind to liberal policies or legislation introduced by non-liberals.

All liberals have struggled of late when claims they’ve made are falsified and often seek to blame wokies for them. Doyle is no exception to this, but then, nor am I. A significant part of watching national populists bring the post-1990 liberal international order to an end has been the unpleasant and melancholy realisation that there are also untruths—attempts to make 1=0—at the heart of liberalism.

Take immigration, for example. We now know from the presence of that vast unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, otherwise known as “Australia,” that it must be selective and carefully managed, or it has destructive social, cultural, and economic effects. However, the original claim that immigration’s marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for everyone in society was made by liberals, especially libertarians. Libertarians are as much part of the liberal tradition as Margaret Thatcher or Steven Pinker, and indeed share some of the same preoccupations as both those individuals, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and personal autonomy. Even the argument for open borders—often blamed on the woke with their “no-one is illegal, borders are a construct” signs at protests—did not originate with them. It was first made by libertarians.

The claim that human beings are sufficiently similar—that is, we all want roughly the same things—to make liberal universalism possible at a level above the nation-state is another untruth, one that underlies the failure of the “global rules-based order.” Recent laments have sought to pin the blame on one Donald J. Trump, but all he did was kick the rotting edifice, whereupon it collapsed. That it does not obtain at a level above the nation-state has been obvious for decades: see the UN or NATO’s military free riding. A belief in the fundamental interchangeability of human beings has led to Pollyannaish absurdities elsewhere, too. I’m old enough to remember free market liberals arguing that when China liberalised economically, it would liberalise politically. The same people often claimed that free trade and free movement would lead to global equalisation of incomes.

However—and this is more serious, because it involves matters of life and death—sometimes liberalism is not wanted: see Afghanistan.

Because regime change and nation-building are forms of colonialism, they are hard—but not impossible—to do well. I accept Nigel Biggar’s argument that colonialism can be done well, although most people—not just liberals—are unwilling to think through what that means.

Thanks to the Romans, for example, Europeans are monogamous, do not marry their cousins, developed the rule of law, and have had a rich tradition of civic nationalism upon which to draw. Never forget, however, the treatment these same Romans meted out to the conservative monotheists who lived in the province of “Judaea.” On top of two catastrophic military defeats—defeats that involved the sale into slavery of vast numbers of people and the scattering across Europe and the Near East of many others—Romans wiped out Judaism’s priestly caste and crushed those of its cultural traits they disliked. Think stoning people for religious or moral infractions, for example. Their signature tool in this endeavour was mass crucifixion. Recall, too, that the attractive civic nationalism their culture produced was born of necessity. If you have an all-volunteer citizen army and require vast numbers of soldiers to defend your empire, you cannot condition recruitment on ethnicity. In more modern times, regime change was effective in Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War. The same point about catastrophic military defeats applies, however, along with a side-serving of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

Thanks to this collective failure to think our thoughts through to the end, we are now faced with the reality that because regime change failed so spectacularly in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, countries that do genuinely desire a liberal founding across much of their population—Ukraine is the most salient example—are now being abandoned to a form of Great Power politics not seen since the late nineteenth century. On this point, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is probably worse than it was in 2001. All the calls to “liberate” them, one sees—often coupled with bizarre attempts to boycott the country’s cricket team—require colonialism: not just any colonialism, but colonialism of an unusually fierce sort.

In their anxiety to defend liberalism from what really is ordnance on all sides, liberals are making two key mistakes. They’re often unfair to liberalism’s critics or blind to liberal policies or legislation introduced by non-liberals—particularly national populists like Trump. A vivid example of the latter is affirmative action, a bad idea with genuine liberal roots. It is convenient to blame Ibram X. Kendi for the cod claim that all differences in outcomes between groups are down to racism, but the doctrine of disparate impact—from which Kendi’s argument derives—became part of US law in 1971. Kendi was born in 1982. Meanwhile, intersectionality wasn’t even a twinkle in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s eye—she was 12.

It took humans centuries to learn that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their immediate family or extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs: one only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern—from Njal’s Saga to The Godfather—to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational vengeance is the norm. And yet for years, a US Supreme Court comprised of liberals punished whites or Asians (and sometimes both) who had never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This was done to compensate blacks who had not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people to other black people in the past.

May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta—a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome—for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.

Trump is doing all in his power—including by dint of judicial appointments—to ensure that educational and employment opportunities go to the right person for the job and aren’t based on some pre-installed identity characteristic. The national populist is doing a liberal thing. He is opposed in this by many people who call themselves liberals.

Better law and better policy are grounded in superior insight, and the way to garner that insight is talk among people who can engage in productive disagreement.

On the first point—liberals not taking liberalism’s critics seriously enough—I think Doyle is too dismissive of Louise Perry’s claim that liberalism is both corrosive of and parasitic on the moral guardrails necessary to preserve a functioning civic order. Perry draws some of her arguments here from radical feminism, a non-liberal ideological tradition. However, radical feminism has made itself worthy of attention because its adherents were right about transactivism before anyone else, even conservatives.

What else are they right about?

For my part, I suspect radical feminists are right about surrogacy. There are multiple immoral markets in the world, surrogacy is only one. Think alcohol, tobacco, gambling, cannabis, prostitution, pornography, contract killing, people. The solution in all such cases is not the libertarian’s “legalise, regulate, and tax,” because it may not be possible to manage a given immoral market justly. Some immoral markets should be illegal. Libertarians who think people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery are a genuine lunatic fringe. Debate about the boundary between legal/regulated and illegal/prohibited in each case needs to happen, however, with no outcome foreclosed.

As part of this process, libertarian-leaning economists get to teach radfems about trade-offs, while radfems will teach economists that labour-market exploitation based on the physical differences between men and women is a real thing that exists. Better law and better policy are grounded in superior insight, and the way to garner that insight is talk among people who can engage in productive disagreement.

That said, the lies imported into liberalism from elsewhere make universal liberalism and open borders and commercial surrogacy look sane. Let us recall some of them.

A person with a penis can be a woman. There is no problem having someone who has gone through male puberty competing in women’s sports. The surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors for gender non-conforming behaviour represents care and compassion. Moralising racial differences is outrageous if you put whites on top but morally laudable if you put whites on the bottom. Words are violence, but silence is also violence. The lab-leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory. Defunding the police would have no effect on homicide rates. A disease whose risks were overwhelmingly concentrated among the metabolically compromised demanded general lockdowns and closed schools. Jews are not indigenous to Israel, so can be treated as settler-colonialists, even when they are refugees from Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Arabs are indigenous to Palestine, despite arriving centuries later.

Some of the daftest ideas in that paragraph came from the universities and were developed by extraordinarily illiberal academics. That liberals followed them off an ideological cliff is bad enough, but even worse is the extent to which authoritarian brainrot has corrupted one of our major sense-making institutions—higher education.

I suggested to my Edinburgh audience that one way for liberalism to extricate itself from the mire—rather than apologising, which these days seems only to invite further dogpiling—would be a simple acknowledgement of wrongness. Accepting wrongness is a way to remind folk that no set of ideological commitments protects you from failing to think your thoughts through to the end. If you find those commitments get in the way of doing so, they are sabotaging your ability to think about how things really are. Doyle is scrupulous to avoid the “real liberalism has never been tried” argument, precisely because liberalism hasn’t been found out the way Marxism has. Liberalism not only can be but has been a better version of itself. That means it’s possible to use an imperative beloved of wokies and have it mean something.

Do better, liberals. God knows we’re capable.