Is Liberalism the Best Way to Defeat Wokeism?

No, It is the Only Way to Achieve a Liberal Society.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Yesterday, I wrote about whether or not liberalism has failed or whether we are failing to do liberalism. My contention is that it is the latter. No political/ethical/social/economic philosophy can work if we don’t use it. Currently, there simply aren’t enough people consistently defending freedom of belief and speech, opposing the evaluation of individuals by their race, sex or other immutable characteristics and taking an evidence-based reformist (rather than revolutionary or reactionary) approach to social progress for liberalism to work, either in law or in culture. This seems to be due to many liberals having forgotten how to do this consistently and everybody else not wanting to do it in the first place.

This piece is a continuation of this theme by looking at the question of whether liberalism is the best way to defeat Critical Social Justice (CSJ): AKA wokeism. People raise this very reasonable question with me often. I recently had a very angry American gentleman appear randomly on an Instagram post of mine to ask if I will ever have the honesty to admit that I was 100% wrong to urge Americans liberals not to vote for Donald Trump. After reminding me of my own claim that the liberal left is needed to push back the Critical Social Justice left and then informing me of President Biden’s complicity in the promotion of “gender ideology” and “CRT malarkey” he concludes: “When are you going to admit you were wrong and those on the "extreme alt-right" (but really just normal people who are not stupid) were correct about where this would all go?” He then either blocked me or Instagram blocked him so I was unable to reply. I would have said:

I am not in the habit of calling normal people who are not stupid “the extreme alt-right.” Nor would I put conservatives more generally into this category. I particularly respect liberal conservatives trying to address illiberalism on the right. (Well done on the liberal trajectory towards acceptance of same-sex marriage). Nor do I at all deny that a right-wing party would be less tolerant of Critical Social Justice than a left-wing one. This is because CSJ is an illiberal movement on the left. I have been very open in my criticism of this movement and about this being what liberals on the left currently need to work against particularly strongly when a left-wing party is in power. In the same way, liberals on the right have to address illiberalism in their parties particularly strongly when they are in power.

This is why I can be completely honest and say I still think the GOP is “not the solution for anyone who values science and reason and wants to protect a liberal society that defends freedom of belief and speech and viewpoint diversity as well as rigorous scholarship and consistently ethical activism for genuine racial, gender & LGBT equality.” If that wasn’t what you wanted to protect, I was not addressing you. If it was, then we can oppose authoritarian Critical Social Justice together as a legitimate impediment to it, but do pay attention to all the book banning and conspiracy theorizing coming from the right. For me, all the women who no longer have access to abortion & could die due to actions driven by the Republican party when it wasn’t even in power stand out. If you can avoid being a single issue thinker, you might see why somebody could be unconvinced that the GOP is the party more committed to liberal principles right now, even if you still disagree with them.

Single issue thinking is simply not compatible with liberalism. Even an authoritarian wants to protect the freedom of people who agree with them. Unfortunately, it is quite easy for a liberal to become an authoritarian. As the political scientist, Karen Stenner argues and demonstrates in her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait but can arise in response to a perceived threat. When we feel ourselves to be secure, humans are most tolerant of difference. When we feel ourselves to be in danger, we are the least tolerant. Jonathan Haidt, discussing authoritarianism in relation to nations and drawing on Stenner’s work says:

Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.

We have many examples of this phenomenon historically when a relatively stable community faces a threat and responds by becoming intolerant of difference. There is no rational reason at all why the arrival of the Black Death in Europe should have resulted in mass persecution of Jews, but it did. “Survival values” came to the fore during a disaster and intensified in-group bias and out-group hostility even though the out-group was not at all responsible for the disaster? On an individual level, this can take the form of ‘radicalisation’ in which the individual is worked upon to induce a sense of fear and danger from, again, an out-group, which can result in dehumanisation and violence.

It is this switch that can be flipped from emancipative (liberal) values to survival values that can make a liberal an authoritarian and I would suggest that ‘single issue thinking’ can also have this effect. Those of us who focus intensely on one kind of cultural problem need to be particularly careful not to flip this switch in ourselves. It is all too easy for somebody who begins studying a particular cultural issue and starts out with liberal principles which they try to apply consistently to become increasingly anxious and convinced that this is the one big threat to society until they are no longer guided by their principles but determined only to defeat this one thing. This phenomenon is often seen in online political commentators and described with the phrase “If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”

Today, one of my readers ( a much more thoughtful Dutchman)* commented on the last essay saying that he thought it was a fair empirical question to ask whether liberalism is the most effective way to combat CSJ. I think he is quite right. However, I would quibble a little and say that the exchange of just one word would produce different answers in my mind.

Is liberalism is the most effective way to combat CSJ?

Probably not, no.

Is liberalism the best way to combat CSJ?

Yes, absolutely. It’s essential.

It depends very much on what your primary aim is. If the primary aim is to get rid of CSJ, then pushing it out with another popular illiberal belief system could well be more effective than trying to get a consensus on the 'live and let live' approach of liberalism. If your primary aim is to live in a liberal society I do not see any other way to achieve that than liberalism.

There really are only two ways to deal with any authoritarian movement that has power and prestige in society.

1. Become more strongly liberal and fully & consistently insist upon people's rights to hold and express their own vies and not to have others' imposed on them

2. Put our strength behind whichever authoritarian belief system we dislike least that also has the potential to squash out the ones we dislike most.

While belief systems vary widely, any that gains the cultural power to make the social rules will ultimately either allow people freedom of belief and speech or it won't. If you have to pretend to hold certain political, religious or philosophical views or pretend not to hold the ones you do hold to avoid material harm to your person or livelihood, it is authoritarian. If you are being “held accountable” to anybody else’s religion, politics or philosophy, rather than just reasonable laws and responsibilities of citizenship that apply to everyone, it it is authoritarian.

Yesterday, I said I will not do the Ibram X. Kendi style argument about liberalism: “You can either be liberal or illiberal. There is no such thing as ‘non-liberal.’ When speaking of a worldview that someone holds it can certainly be non-liberal if it does not share the foundational principles of philosophical liberalism but is not authoritarian in that it does not seek to impose any views on or ban any views of other people. I do not intend to tell anyone who is not an authoritarian that they are a philosophical liberal. They could, for example, be a conservative Christian who does not wish to force anybody else to be one. In this case, their own worldview is not liberal, but their attitude towards the religious freedoms of others is.

When it comes to wielding power to make the social rules and penalise dissent, this really can only go one way or the other depending on whether it does penalise dissent or not. There is no such thing as ‘a little bit authoritarian’ or ‘partial freedom of speech.’ Whenever somebody says “I support freedom of speech but…” followed by something that forbids the expression of certain ideas or justifies penalising people for expressing them, they would do better to say that they believe protecting people from certain ideas is more important than freedom of speech. This is a coherent and arguable ethical position. It is just not a liberal one.

I am belabouring this point because it is central to understanding the significance of the question “Is liberalism the best way to defeat wokeness?” The answer to this comes down to whether you see liberalism as a tool to defang a specific ideology or as an end goal in itself.

Take our hypothetical conservative Christian again and put him in a predominantly Muslim country. It is in his interests then to strive for a liberal government and culture as this will enable him freedom of religion. But is it in his principles? We can find out if we move him to a predominantly Christian country. If he still defends freedom of religion even though it now benefits people who are not him and believe things he must think are wrong, it seems very likely that he sees a liberal society as an end goal in itself. If he does not defend freedom of religion but supports or condones authoritarian Christianity, it is very likely he was using liberalism as a tool in a specific situation and his end goal is primarily a Christian society. Again, this is a coherent and arguable ethical position if he believes Christianity to be better for society than freedom of belief. Again, it is not a liberal one.

It is important to be clear about whether you consider liberalism to be your end goal or whether it is a tool in your arsenal for reaching a different end goal. My impression is discussion is that a significant number of people are not clear about this. If you are somebody who considers yourself liberal and opposes the Critical Social Justice movement and its authoritarianism, do you primarily oppose CSJ or authoritarianism? Do you consistently oppose authoritarianism and consider CSJ to be a current, powerful example of it? Or is your primary goal defanging CSJ specifically so that you might consider a range of options including giving an alternative ideology equivalent power to make the social rules and impose them on people?

Of course, practical reality is not so black and white as this, however principled we may be and however committed to liberalism as an end goal. As discussed above, liberals are quite often forced into a ‘lesser of two evils’ position when it comes to voting when neither party is being particularly liberal and the only alternative is not voting at all. Many seem to feel that we are in a similar position now with cultural movements and that it has come to a ‘lesser of two evils’ choice from which, if obtained, it could be easier to work towards liberalism as an end goal. I see their point but I am holding out and would encourage everybody to hold out. I have been accused by a good friend of taking this to an extreme, but I am pretty sure that I would become authoritarian before it came to the situation he describes. Maybe.

*A previous version of this piece misstated my correspondent’s nationality as American.