CLASSICAL LIBERALISM IS IN CRISIS
The bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order looks at the challenges that liberalism is facing from the right and the left in his new groundbreaking work.
It is clear that liberalism has been in retreat in recent years. According to Freedom House, political rights and civil liberties around the world rose during the three and a half decades between 1974 and the early 2000s, but have been falling for fifteen straight years prior to 2021 in what has been labeled a democratic recession or even depression.
In established liberal democracies, it is the liberal institutions that have come under immediate attack. Leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and America’s Donald Trump were all legitimately elected, and have used their electoral mandates to attack liberal institutions in the first instance. These include the courts and justice system, nonpartisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances. Orbán has been quite successful in packing the courts with his supporters and bringing the bulk of Hungarian media under the control of his allies. Trump was less successful in his attempts to weaken institutions like the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the courts, and the mainstream media, but his intention was much the same.
Liberalism has been challenged in recent years not just by populists of the right, but from a renewed progressive left as well. The critique from this quarter evolved from a charge— correct in itself—that liberal societies were not living up to their own ideals of equal treatment of all groups. This critique broadened over time to attack the underlying principles of liberalism itself, such as its positing of rights in individuals rather than groups, the premise of universal human equality on which constitutions and liberal rights have been based, and the value of free speech and scientific rationalism as methods of apprehending truth. In practice, this has led to intolerance of views that deviate from the new progressive orthodoxy, and the use of different forms of social and state power to enforce that orthodoxy. Dissident voices have been ousted from positions of influence and books effectively banned, often not by governments but by powerful organizations that control their mass distribution.
Populists on the right and progressives on the left are unhappy with present-day liberalism not, I would argue, because of a fundamental weakness in the doctrine. Rather, they are unhappy with the way that liberalism has evolved over the last couple of generations. Beginning in the late 1970s, economic liberalism evolved into what is now labeled neoliberalism, which dramatically increased economic inequality and brought on devastating financial crises that hurt ordinary people far more than wealthy elites in many countries around the globe. It is this inequality that is at the core of the progressive case against liberalism and the capitalist system with which it is associated. Liberalism’s institutional rules protect the rights of everyone, including existing elites who are reluctant to give up either wealth or power, and who therefore stand as obstacles to the march towards social justice for excluded groups.
“Urgent and timely . . . A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice . . . A brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects of liberal thought have consumed themselves.” —Andrew Anthony, The Guardian