The Liberal View: Understanding the Postliberal Right is Crucial
They're certainly not conservatives, as commonly understood.
Welcome back to The Liberal View by TaraElla, where I react to things people write and say out there, from a liberal point of view. I believe this is needed because too many people have lost sight of what the liberal way is. We need to have a truly liberal discourse, and I'm doing my part here.
This week's theme is the 'postliberal' Right. I have been observing this movement for a few years now, and it seems to keep growing. Its unique challenge to liberal values remains underappreciated by many liberals: left-leaning liberals tend to see it as a continuation of the 'religious right' that has long campaigned against abortion and gay marriage, i.e. an 'old enemy' that they know. What they miss is the fact that this 'postliberal' movement actually thinks that post-war conservatism was actually too liberal, and they are going to regain lost ground by importing a more authoritarian and reactionary politics from Eastern Europe. Their contempt for conservative heroes like Reagan has also become not so hidden lately. Meanwhile, right-leaning liberals are still preoccupied with wokeism, and often can't see that not all those who oppose wokeism are doing it for the sake of liberty. Or that wokeism is not the only thing that poses a threat to the classical liberal consensus. Luckily, more and more people have begun realizing that we are dealing with something new and concerning in the 'postliberal' movement, in the past year or so.
The state, in all these examples, is used actively. It’s enlarged. So there’s DeSantis, for example, making an “Election Police Force,” there’s his grinning, fleece-wearing counterpart in Virginia setting up…tip lines…to inform on kids and teachers, nope no Gestapo here, over here in this corner is state after state criminalizing teachers and parents right down to what people can wear. You’re a man, but you dress up as a caricature of a woman, for fun, aka in drag? That’s illegal.
This approach is so extreme, already, that even pretty extreme conservatives are uncomfortable with it. Because, of course, it’s the diametrical opposite of shrinking government, the state, decentralizing power, and so forth. It’s expanding government, centralizing power, intruding into people’s lives, right down to surveilling them and controlling them for a whole new category of “crimes.”
-What Fascism in the 21st Century is Really About by umair haque
While I don't agree with characterizing DeSantis's politics as fascist, they are certainly not conservative, in the long understood sense of the term. Ronald Reagan was a conservative. Ron DeSantis certainly isn't. As noted last time, DeSantis's politics represents something new in the American Right, and this kind of politics is clearly inspired by Viktor Orban, the guy who championed 'illiberal democracy'. While DeSantis is particularly prominent because of his likely 2024 Presidential run, the movement is actually much larger than one individual. We need to take it very seriously.
Real conservatives would be opposed to Orbanism, because it represents a massive increase in state power, the thing conservatives fear most. While this article contains a lot I don't agree with, and I don't share the political views of its author, at least this author gets why Orbanism ain't conservative. I think that the rise of Orbanism in the English-speaking West actually provides liberals with an opportunity to find common ground with (real) conservatives. I even think that our ability to form alliances with (real) conservatives could be crucial to our success in resisting and defeating Orbanism. While liberals and conservatives certainly have their differences, we share a strong aversion to using state power to intrude into the details of everyday life, and I think this should be emphasized more. The liberal commitment to free speech and freedom of conscience are also likely to be attractive for many moderate conservatives, who want to be able to say what they believe and practice what they preach, rather than wanting to remake society the way they like it.
For Bret Stephens—and, I suspect, Bari Weiss—progressive wokeness is an aberration from good, old-fashioned liberalism. What I attempted to convey to both of them, and to her audience, was that the key elements of “wokeness” arise not from some successor philosophy, such as “cultural Marxism,” as most classical liberals wish to claim. Rather, I argued, it is the natural and even inevitable outgrowth of liberalism’s core feature of transgression. Nothing revealed this difference more than a brief debate between Stephens and myself over how to understand the legacy of John Stuart Mill:
Stephens cited Mill’s On Liberty as the text that exemplified his position: people should be as free as possible, so long as they harmed no one in the exercise of their liberty.
I argued, by contrast, that Mill’s argument contains the core of the very progressive liberal ideology that has today emerged as “wokeness.” Mill argues ultimately not for liberty as an inherent good, but as a means to progress. The actual title of his book should have been On Progress, or How Liberty Leads to Progress. The answer: by destroying tradition and overturning a conservative order shaped on behalf of ordinary people, in favor of a revolutionary order that favors a few.
The society that Mill above all seeks to bring about is one that encourages the liberation of transgressive individuals from social, cultural, and traditional norms.
-The Liberal Origins of the Great Awokening by Patrick J. Deneen in Postliberal Order
This is actually an older article, but it illustrates why the postliberal Right's case against liberalism is ridiculous and ultimately highly authoritarian. The postliberal Right basically thinks that wokeness arose because of liberalism's allowance of transgression. However, liberalism allows all ideas to flourish in the marketplace of ideas, and as long as the playing field is fair, trangressive ideas that are unsound would be rejected, as radical thinkers like Marcuse feared. (What is often wrongly called 'cultural Marxism' in the contemporary West should probably be called Marcuseism, since Marcuse essentially invented the foundations of that ideology.) It is the influence of Marcuse and postmodernism since the 1960s, rejecting the liberal commitment towards a free and fair marketplace of ideas, that has made the playing field uneven, especially in intellectual and academic humanities circles. In summary, allowing transgression is not the problem, not allowing opposing voices is, and that is not liberalism's fault.
Also, liberalism has to allow transgression, simply because of its promise to allow free speech, and to (generally) not use aggression against those who are not themselves behaving aggressively towards others. If postliberals think that allowing transgression is the problem, it means they logically embrace a politics that is much more violent, authoritarian and aggressive than what we are used to, because this would be what it takes to actually shut down and prevent all transgression. This belief therefore makes postliberals very dangerous, and even more of a problem for freedom-loving people than the 'woke Left' they claim to oppose, in my opinion.
Explosive allegations made public last month about a St. Louis clinic that treats transgender children have flung parents into a vortex of emotions: shock, confusion, anger, fear...
Almost two dozen parents of children seen at the clinic, which opened in 2017, say their experiences sharply contradict the examples supplied by Jamie Reed, a case manager who left the WU center after being employed there for more than four years. Reed outlined her concerns in an article published online Feb. 9; her sworn affidavit, which included additional allegations, was released that day by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is leading a state investigation.
If you have been following right-leaning and anti-woke media, you are likely to have come across this story - except not this side of it. This is a clear example of right-leaning and anti-woke media presenting only one side of the story. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a more cautious approach when it comes to the medical treatment of trans young people. However, what we need most is objective evidence, and biased reporting is not helpful. What I'm worried about is that the postliberal Right is having more and more influence over the faction of the anti-woke movement that leans Republican, and the postliberals' lack of concern for a fair and healthy marketplace of ideas, as well as their aggressive approach in attacking their opponents, is making this faction of the anti-woke movement less and less objective and fair in their reporting.
Once again, it is left to the local media to report the other side of the story. This is why local decision making is good, and national and international scale culture war politics is bad.
Wokeness began as a development on the progressive left with real but limited influence and only exploded into national prominence in reaction to the moral offenses that were a daily feature of life during the Trump presidency. Likewise, nothing would do more to empower wokeness as a grassroots phenomenon than sending DeSantis to the White House, where he would fight moral illiberalism with political illiberalism, in the process turning left-wing activists into martyrs for freedom and democracy.
We can’t fight wokeness by smashing it politically. We can only fight it by convincing liberal-minded people in powerful positions within private and public institutions that they should stand up to and resist it.
-Welcome to “Looking Left” by Damon Linker
This is an argument that is often missing in anti-woke media. If you don't want wokeness, don't make the conditions ripe for its rise. It's simple common sense. If the postliberal Right is allowed to take power, it will likely pave the way for an eventual total victory by the woke, a generation or so later.
It will happen like this: postliberals will destroy all liberal norms like free speech and freedom of conscience in their governance. They will also hurt innocent people in their quest to smash wokeness politically (they have shown that they are willing to do this already). This will create anger and resentment, especially among the younger generations, who will flock to wokeness (because woke activists will look like martyrs for freedom and democracy to them). Once this reaches a critical mass, the woke will be able to defeat the postliberals (this will inevitably happen because they are younger). The woke will then use the full force of the government to impose wokeness, justified on the grounds that this would be necessary to reverse the damage of the postliberals and to prevent their return. There will also be no liberal norms to stop this from happening (since they would have been destroyed by postliberals in the first place). This is why, if you don't want a totally woke future, you should be very scared of the postliberal Right taking power, in my opinion.
Note: The articles quoted above do not necessarily reflect my views, and I do not endorse their arguments outside of what I have specifically agreed with.
I started seeing the term post-liberal in articles and debates in Sweden in 2018. And today, I understand 3 general things
- There are different versions of "post-liberalism." One original promoter is a more left-wing populist and nationalist writer and think-tanker, David Goodhart. Among other things is famous for its "anywheres vs somewheres" populist narrative describing political conflicts regarding globalization, Brexit, and social liberalism vs. social conservatism. Another example is how Yuval Harari uses the term post-liberal to advocate for a more global and integrated world, in the sense of a "post-liberal world order" that would be more liberal than the liberal international order.
- Yes, the post-liberal right-wingers are not so much about conserving but about disturbing and even destroying, for example liberal/constitutional democracy and values. The aim is changing things through reactionary and collectivist politics, and especially identity politics.
- In practice and when it comes to the economy, much of the post-liberal right and eve left-wing communication is "I want more government intervention in the economy so that people in big cities and urban areas pay more in subsidies for my small town rural life depending on a certain factory or industry"
Ronald Reagan was not in any sense a conservative - he effectively laid the groundwork for the disintegration American culture (such as it was). He could perhaps be described as a psychopath!
http://psychohistory.com/books/reagans-america
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/RonaldReagan_page.html