The New Yorker has an interesting profile of New York Times’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat. I’m a regular reader of Douthat’s op-ed in the Times. They display what should be the norm in intellectual and political public discussions: an ability to engage other persons’ views with arguments that are accessible and acceptable for all parties and expressed in a civil language that does not convey the feeling that those who disagree with you are intellectually inferior. I’ve also enjoyed his book on the cultural decadence of the West,[1] as I think it targets one of the major issues related to the crisis of liberalism, i.e., a general pessimism about the ability of liberal societies to be any longer conducive of all kinds of progress (economic, political, cultural, moral). The New Yorker’s profile quotes Douthat about the troubles of liberalism:
“What liberalism – élite liberalism, whatever you call it – doesn’t have is just a theory of persuasion.”
I think this indeed nails what is the major problem in our current crisis. Proponents of liberalism (in one form or another), that is, proponents of the status quo, have lost the ability to persuade citizens of liberal democracies that the current state of affairs is the best we can have, despite all the problems and imperfections. In my view, liberals’ strategies of persuasion fall into one of the following categories:
· Strategies relying on fear. Liberals who choose strategies relying on fear to persuade tend to use a rhetoric that dramatizes the risks associated with the endorsement of illiberal ideas, especially if those who endorse them acquire too much political power. They are prone to remind people of what happened in the 1930s. I include in this category “softer” strategies that exhibit a typical liberal skepticism and emphasize the perils of politics on definite views about the good life.
· Strategies relying on expertise. Many liberals ground their defense on the claim that the current state of the art in social sciences strongly indicates that liberal democracy and free-market economy are the best political and economic arrangements for human societies. They rely on data to show that the human condition has never improved as much as under these arrangements. They use theories to argue we know why this is so.
· Strategies relying on morality. A great number of liberals argue that liberal democracies are grounded on moral principles and corresponding fundamental rights which justification is beyond doubt. The underlying idea is that there has been a form of moral progress that culminates in inclusivist morality and the recognition of a large range of rights, including to non-human beings. The claim is then that the institutions of liberal democracy (and, eventually, free-market economy) are the only ones that guarantee that these rights will indeed be recognized and implemented.
In practice, these types of strategies are of course not mutually exclusive. They can be combined in different ways to push for different versions of liberalism. Strategies relying on morality can for instance serve the defense of a more pro-market form of liberalism (if the rhetoric uses the idea that individuals have natural rights) or rather of “progressive” liberalism (if it is argued that there are “positive” rights besides purely “negative” ones). Strategies relying on expertise can be used to defend the technocratic dimension of liberal democracies or more basically to remind voters that they should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Douthat’s claim – and I tend to agree – is that liberals don’t have a theory about how to best persuade people that the status quo – or a society that is in the neighborhood of our current one – is the one that should be preferred by everybody. Different kinds of strategies are used and combined, but so far this is a relative failure. Liberals have forgotten how to persuade.
How can we account for this inability? Several considerations are relevant here. First, there is the natural disadvantage of the incumbent. Most of the people who have been living in Western countries for the last 80 years have known nothing but the institutions of liberal democracy and free-market economy. The collective memory of life under different political and economic regimes is just fading. Of course, within the set of liberal societies, many different economic and political arrangements are possible. But they all share a large number of features. Because of that, we have largely lost the ability to compare regimes – the comparison is merely theoretical and hypothetical, which opens the door to all kinds of fantasies and false beliefs. There is a big contrast here with people who have been living under the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s – for them, the comparison has a far more vivid meaning. The problem of incumbents in politics is that it is difficult for them to mask their failures. Liberal democracy has the same problem. Liberal societies have a lot of imperfections, they are facing many challenges without obvious solutions to address them, and this is mostly transparent for everybody. Cognitive biases are surely at play here. Difficulties are more salient when we are directly or indirectly confronting them than when they are hypothetical.
Second, the liberal persuasive endeavor faces the difficulty that “illiberalism” is neither monolithic nor static. The principles and institutions of liberal societies are attacked from many different angles by several and significantly different opponents. Attacks come from the conservative right, the anti-elitist and xenophobic far-right, the environmentalist left, the anti-elitist and “woke” far-left, and so on. Moreover, the arguments and ideas of these different blocks evolve. As a today's article in The Economist notes, far-right populists in Europe have for example changed their discourse regarding the European Union and the Euro. They are also now targeting pro-climate policies. This evolution is not fortuitous. Populist actors are rational in the Downsian sense.[2] They determine their political offer based on voters’ preferences and other parties’ strategies and policies. The old strategy of demonizing the far-right (based on a mix of fear and morality) just no longer works because people’s views have evolved and populists have adapted.
Last but not least, the problem is that many of the defenders of the liberal society have lost most of their credibility. They can say whatever they want, many people don’t trust them. More and more, they don’t listen to them or even ignore them. These people just don’t care. In many respects, this is a backlash of bad political practices, bad political and economic decisions, and ostensible lies made over the past four or five decades. Persuasion is a language game. It must take place within a broad agreement on rules about the kind of language that can be used, the meaning of words, and a general disposition to follow common practices. In a liberal democracy, the problem is not “polarization” of opinions and beliefs per se. Discussion and persuasion can still take place, at least in principle, among a polarized population. The problem of today is that there is no longer a public forum where arguments and reasons can be publicly discussed, confronted, and eventually rejected. Too many citizens no longer want to play this language game, at least with these rules.
The crisis of the liberal society is therefore not only a crisis of ideas but more fundamentally a crisis of the way to convey them. By principle, liberals refrain from the use of coercion to make people abide by certain rules or adopt some practices. Persuasion is their only weapon. But how do you persuade people who don’t listen to you?
[1] Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020).
[2] Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (Boston: Pearson, 1957 [1997]).
There is no doubt that many on the left hold most of the liberal political tenets, though I think there are meaningful exceptions - I'm thinking here of the so-called "cancel culture" that is not completely a fantasy of the conservative right. This is less clear however with respect to economic principles, i.e., the idea that, in general, the price mechanism is the best way to allocate resources. I think this is more and more contested. The idea of an "economic populism" (to use an expression of Dani Rodrik) is gaining ground.
This is interesting and the explanation sounds plausible, perhaps why people tend to be less convinced.
But I don't see any meaningful illiberalism on the left. Even if leftists don't call themselves liberals, they all hold the fundamental liberal tenets --people are fundamental moral equals, with rights, individuals matter, etc. Leftists in liberal democracies are defenders of liberalism, even if they think they're doing something more radical.