Since March, I have tried to use this space to work out what it means to be a liberal, and to consider alternative visions of civil society. At the simplest level, liberalism requires humility and tolerance.
But is tolerance possible when humility is absent? Yeats famously diagnosed the problem:
The “best” are the people who agree with us; the “worst” are those benighted souls who oppose us. I can’t possibly be tolerant of you when you are so wrong.
Does that mean liberalism is unsustainable in the face of populism?
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Presuming Liberty
Following Adam Smith, I have argued for a presumption in favor of decentralized private choice and emergent institutions. That presumption is rebuttable, but the burden of proof must lie on anyone who claims that centralized power and the denial of individual agency is better. My approach, using “public choice,” recognizes that politics is an indispensable means of achieving collective, cooperative outcomes without privileging or romanticizing the state.
The state should not be dismissed as evil, but neither should it be romanticized as inherently good, a focus of moral value in and of itself. There are legitimate and difficult questions about whether there is a collective “will” that the state discovers and enacts. The most plausible, and modest, claim is that people use the technology of “state power” to provide mutual protection and achieve shared goals.
The alternatives to this modest view of the state are a wide and haphazard range of different moral and practical collectivisms, imposed by central authorities. We can agree that the state must have police authority, but endowing the state with moral authority is simply incompatible with liberalism. Karl Marx, to his credit, identified the potential problem in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” and correctly diagnosed the sources of populism as a dispossession and disruption of social cohesion. It is no great stretch to extend Marx’s analysis of the nineteenth century to the present, as the resurgence of populism portends a new paroxysm of authoritarian excess.
The tendency of an order to become disordered is characteristic of physical systems; we have seen that authoritarian political systems likewise have that tendency. But, and it pains me to concede, the same can be said of the order that is liberalism. To survive, liberalism must balance the power of majorities and the rights of individuals. But are not majorities, especially populist majorities, just as corruptible and dangerous as an individual autocrat? If a constitution cannot constrain an autocrat, it cannot constrain a populist mob.
Liberalism is not a checklist of ideal policy solutions. Instead, it is an evolved answer to the permanent political problem: some people want to rule, and many of the other people want to be ruled over. Many citizens want a strong leader to fix all their problems and make the world right. Liberalism is a means of controlling and limiting the impacts of these hasty impulses, but it is sustainable only so long as it is broadly supported by the citizens it protects.
Can Liberalism Survive Populism?
The pattern is clear: the populist impulse of the citizens, who want to be ruled by a strongman, sometimes aligns with the desire of a would-be autocrat, who wants the job of ruling them. That background suggests that the survival of liberalism is far from assured. How can a political order built on limiting power survive? In the Republic, Plato famously spelled out how populism becomes tyranny, saying that
The protector of the people… having a mob entirely at his disposal…is not restrained… By the favourite method of false accusation he brings [enemies] into court…some he kills and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition of lands…Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolf—that is, a tyrant? (Republic, Book VIII)
The language is archaic, but the description sounds as if it had been taken from this morning’s newspaper. The tyrant is even taking his enemies to court.
James Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan mimics Plato’s argument, but it focuses on structure instead of bad actors. Starting in a state of nature, where each grabs what they want and holds what they can, Buchanan accepts the Hobbesian claim that rational, self-interested people would agree to accept some kind of protective state. But then, in Buchanan’s account, the same government that rescues you from anarchy could also become a new source of predation.
Public choice economics emphasizes structural flaws instead of bad actors. The reason for that emphasis is that the will to power is everywhere: I would rather be the one making the rules than the one following them. And you probably would, too. If I had power, I am convinced I would use it to do good. In fact, given that there is so much good to be done, it makes no sense for me to accept limits on my power, unless I am forced to do so. You might say the same things about yourself, and about how you would use that power. I could tell myself, and then tell others, a very good story about why that arrangement served everyone’s interest. And likewise you. Of course, if I already have power, no one can force me to accept new limits, and my ability to command mobs allows me to break through the limits that already exist.
Frustratingly, it is precisely that fact—that no one would accept limits on their own power—that justifies liberalism’s insistence on limitations on power in general. There are no people “good” enough to be entrusted with unlimited power; I am willing to accept exclusion from power as long as everyone else is, also.
Of course, that claim is contestable, and it may well simply be wrong. But I want to take a slightly different direction: Assuming that my claim about liberalism is correct, and that no other system can limit coercion and repression, is liberalism sustainable?
Militant Democracy: Loewenstein’s Dilemma
Constitutional limits on the state, and internal checks and balances, are liberalism’s answers to the universal desire to rule. But what happens when the threat to liberal democracy comes not from a king or a bureaucrat but from a political movement that uses liberalism’s own procedures and protections to destroy liberalism?
This is the problem Karl Loewenstein called “militant democracy” in a two-part essay for the American Political Science Review in June 1937, written as fascism was sweeping Europe. Loewenstein’s central observation was that fascism is not really an ideology with a program; it
“simply wants to rule.” What made fascism so dangerous was that it exploited the tolerance of the democracies it openly set out to destroy. Fascist movements organized as legally recognized parties, used parliamentary immunities, contested elections, and enjoyed unmolested communication. They remained advocates within liberalism until they were strong enough to dispense with it.
Loewenstein’s account of the Weimar Republic is a caution: German democracy, out of a scrupulous and ultimately suicidal legalism, declined to restrict a party openly organizing paramilitary violence and explicitly campaigning to abolish the Constitution. Loewenstein’s conclusion was blunt: “Democracy must become militant.” Concretely, that meant legislation banning antidemocratic parties, restricting paramilitary organization, and suspending some of the civil liberties fascism was exploiting.
The paradox is obvious; such measures could only be taken “at the risk and cost of violating fundamental principles” in order to rescue those principles from a greater threat. That dilemma has not gone away. Alexander Kirshner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy expands the argument in the twenty-first century context: granting participation rights to groups that reject democratic values endangers the very rights on which liberal democracy depends. But asserting and using the power to deny those rights can also damage the liberal values a democracy claims to protect.
Militant democracy sounds plausible, but by its own argument, it cannot limit power. The ability to limit democracy to protect democracy is simply the original problem itself, armed with a new and even more powerful weapon. Loewenstein himself saw this danger clearly, even as he endorsed the militant response, warning that once democracies concentrate authority to protect their own fundamental principles, they risk destroying them.
Is liberalism, and its political manifestation—democracy—sustainable in the face of this dilemma? Earlier, I defined liberalism as the twin constraints of humility (I cannot assume I am right) and toleration (I cannot assume you are wrong). But an ideology or political movement that lacks humility can exploit tolerance until it breaks. More simply, someone who knows the truth, for certain, and is willing to use force to impose their conception of the right on all of society, can use Plato’s “mob,” or what we now call populism, to gain control.
Sustainability depends on a constant, delicate rebalancing, and an acceptance that there is no permanent rule that settles these questions once and for all. Liberalism’s strength lies in the value of its conception of human nature: since the desire to rule, even just to do good, is universal, choosing or electing “good people” can never be enough. It’s not just that sometimes bad people will be elected, though that is true. The real problem is that even good people expand their capacity to direct and coerce everyone else; the only durable check on this impulse is a set of rules that might be chosen before anyone knows whether he will be the ruler or the ruled.
This “veil of ignorance” provides a mindset that defines limits on the exercise of power, including even (or especially) the people who currently believe themselves virtuous enough to be trusted with more. But there is a problem: Loewenstein’s militant-democracy dilemma shows that liberal constitutions cannot protect themselves without confronting an irreducible judgment call about which speech, which parties, and which movements have forfeited their claim on democratic toleration. The veil of ignorance is no help, because authorities have to know which speech will be allowed and which will be curtailed or prohibited. The necessity of that kind of judgment creates new opportunities for the very abuse of power constitutions exist to prevent. There is no rule that resolves this in advance for every case. Every generation of liberals has to make that judgment again, under real uncertainty, knowing it might get the balance wrong in either direction—toward a tolerance that lets its enemies dismantle it or toward a militancy that becomes indistinguishable from the thing it was meant to stop.
Of course, there will always be people who look in the mirror and see a king, a president, or a Bonaparte waiting for his moment. If their populist followers are sure that they are right, and other positions are wrong, tolerance by the rest of society can be actively dangerous. The problem is that, as Loewenstein pointed out, withdrawing tolerance cannot be the answer.
In 1770, a century and a half before Yeats’s dire pronouncement, Voltaire noted the same problem, but with a more hopeful conclusion. In a letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, he said: “Doubt is not a very pleasant state, but certainty is absurd…Only charlatans are certain... In our deep ignorance, let us do our best.”
If liberalism is to survive, it will require that advocates restore political humility to its rightful place. Tolerance is only dangerous if humility is lacking.
