“The Republic divides us least.” So said Adolphe Thiers, a shapeshifter of 19th-century French politics in the Marco Rubio mold. By the early 1870s, the various factions in French society had exhausted themselves fighting. Since 1814 there had been two restorations of the Bourbon dynasty, a liberal Orléans dynasty, a socialist commune, waves of clericalism and anti-clericalism, two periods of military dictatorship and a second Bonaparte. Out of this exhaustion came the Third Republic, the creation of Thiers and Léon Gambetta. The Third Republic was a triumph of liberalism: the recognition that France was now a plural society over which no one social force could gain a permanent mastery.
The jostling would carry on, but it would do so within liberal institutions: a parliament, a free press, independent law courts. These factions agreed on almost nothing, apart from the need to preserve the “liberal forms” in which their jostling and horse-trading went on. This society could convict Captain Dreyfus or exonerate him. It might vote funds for the Sacré-Cœur basilica (1873) or secularize all of the public schools (1905). It could choose clericalist ministers or socialist ones. In 1871 and 1873, it nearly brought back the Bourbons again. It could do all these things, as long as they were being done through constitutional channels – through the liberal forms.
So far so good. But what would happen if one the factions started to insist that any opposition to its political project was an attack on these “liberal forms”? The rewards would be immense. Their foes would no longer be normal political opponents but enemies of the constitution, outside the law.
There is an irritating unwordliness to how our authors talk about politics
This, in its broad outlines, has been the story of politics in the western world over the past ten years. Faced with a new set of adversaries in the mid-2010s, western establishments began to declare that liberal forms now also meant immigration, or particular international treaties, or anti-racism. As such, opponents of these things were not just political rivals but enemies of liberal society itself – and emergency measures might have to be used against them.
Days into Donald Trump’s first administration a law professor at Georgetown claimed that the President’s skepticism of NATO was grounds for a military putsch. In Britain it was argued, grotesquely, that the vote to leave the EU, an international trading bloc, was an attack on liberal institutions and should therefore be overturned. The Thatcherite Nigel Farage was magicked into a would-be generalissimo. Real liberal societies such as the Third Republic or the England of the 19th century would have been able to settle these sorts of questions in a civilized way; under what now passes for liberalism they are simply declared out of bounds, matters for the police. Any proposed departure from the world of the 1990s is turned into an existential struggle where people are thrown in prison.
Modern “liberals” are not the first to hit on this idea. In the latter days of the republic, the Roman Senate said that the Gracchi brothers’ policy of land reform put them beyond the pale of the constitution. Otto von Bismarck declared Germany’s Social Democrats were Reichsfeinde – enemies of society. Two recent books on liberalism make a similar case for our own time.
In Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism by Alan S. Kahan (published in 2023 and recently reissued in paperback) and Centrists of the World Unite! by Adrian Wooldridge, we are offered fresh definitions of liberalism. Strangely enough, these definitions happen to include everything that our authors like, while excluding everything they do not. Trump, Farage, Alice Weidel, Boris Johnson and the family Le Pen, who fall short of this standard, are thus declared illiberal, strongmen in the making.
To Kahan, liberalism is “the search for a society in which no one need be afraid.” Liberalism has not been the defense of “some list of ‘rights’” but a series of improvised responses to particular fears: fear of despotism and religious fanaticism in the 17th and 18th centuries; of Jacobinism and the counterrevolution in the early 19th century; of poverty in the late 19th century; of totalitarianism in the second half of the 20th century.
Each of these involved “the dispersion of power necessary to keep people safe.” Modern populism, the idea that certain racial and sexual minorities “ought to be afraid,” is the latest menace that will eventually demand a liberal response. Unlike Kahan, Wooldridge is not writing in an academic register and so his definition of liberalism is looser, a “set of motifs” which have something to do with individualism and freedom, something to do with the distinction between public and private and something to do with “moderation” in the abstract; at any rate, modern populists are outside of it.
Everything our authors dislike turns out to be illiberal – which is to say, lawless and extra-constitutional. Trump’s hostility to the North Atlantic partnership and his enthusiasm for tariffs already make him a would-be Caesar, Wooldridge implies. So does his excitement at military parades – we might recall F.D.R. and French President Emmanuel Macron putting on a few of these. Kahan is even more sweeping. If illiberalism is the notion that some people ought to be afraid, and if that includes, for example, the restrictions on immigration that the populists propose, then it is hard to see how any non-egalitarian ideas could possibly be allowed under liberal democracy at all.
There is an irritating unworldliness to how our authors talk about politics. Even the most basic maneuverers of politicians disturb them. Wooldridge accuses Johnson of Bonapartist designs because he “whipped up the Tory-supporting press into a populist frenzy,” “fought a general election on the question of ‘getting Brexit done,’” and prorogued Britain’s parliament, an expedient previously used by the noted illiberal strongman Clement Attlee.
The tactic of raising the People against the Establishment is an old one in politics, perhaps the oldest of them all. Liberal societies used to be able to take it in their stride. But to Kahan this is all a dangerous novelty, evidence of an extreme philosophical “monism” which recalls the Jacobins. Ambiguity seems to unsettle both our authors. Like many modern “liberals,” they do not come across as people temperamentally suited to the sort of jostling, plural society in which different ideas and different classes do battle.
You can, cynically, claim that all criticisms of your view of the world are attacks on liberal democracy
Wooldridge says that the “most important resource” in a democracy is “an agreed set of facts” – as if half of the debates in a liberal democracy aren’t about what the facts are in the first place. Kahan’s phrases about “making people afraid” are anti-political. They imply that there are no real conflicts in society, no great questions to answer, no necessary antagonisms, that all of this is just a matter of simple decency.
Should any of this really surprise us? Liberalism has often been a conservative sort of idea. Most of the great liberal moments before the 19th century began as defenses of local and feudal privilege. A reforming monarch would look to overhaul the administration, only to be met by some quite fatuous claims of oppression from the gentry and the magnates. More often than not, the “dispersion of power” has been about preserving a set of vested interests. It is much the same now. Today’s world is one of highly decentralized power, in which transnational law courts prevent governments from controlling their countries’ borders, activists can veto the construction of reservoirs and sanctuary cities flout the will of the legislature. “Liberalism” in the 2020s is the defense of the chartered freedoms which stop the state from carrying out the most basic tasks of administration.
This type of liberalism is ultimately self-defeating, because it prevents the emergency changes of course that a society will have to make from time to time. If every attempt to change something about the status quo is made into a constitutional crisis, then there is no way for a democracy to reform itself in a peaceful way. Wooldridge wants action to stop illegal immigration and a restoration of meritocracy to the universities – all well and good, but in practice this would mean the executive using its powers to impose new admissions criteria and to limit the remit of the courts, acts which Wooldridge and co. would no doubt answer with the old charge of Caesarism.
You can, cynically, claim that all criticisms of your view of the world are attacks on liberal democracy. So far, this tactic has served western establishments reasonably well; the price of this is that it makes society’s institutions unreformable. Almost everyone derided the Third Republic and its mess of factions, but it was only destroyed from without. We should be quite surprised if our current system makes it halfway through the century.
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