Liberals are increasingly religious about their own liberalism, treating it like a comprehensive view of reality and the human good
At the peril of sounding like Paul Krugman — who returns to a handful of cherished topics perpetually again in his New York Times column — I optate to revisit one of my hobby horses, which I most recently raised in my discussion of Hobby Lobby.
My own cherished topic is this: Liberalism's decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma.
The decline is especially pronounced on a range of issues wrapped up with religion and sex. For a time, electoral self-interest kept these intolerant tendencies in check, since the vigorously liberal position on convivial issues was limpidly a minority view. But the cultural shift during the Obama years that has led a majority of Americans to fortify gay espousement seems to have opened the floodgates to an uncomely triumphalism on the left.
The result is a dogmatic form of liberalism that threatens to poison American civic life for the prognosticable future. Conservative Reihan Salam describes it, only scarcely hyperbolically, as a form of "weaponized secularism."
The elevate of dogmatic liberalism is the American left-wing expression of the broader trend that Mark Lilla identified in a recent blockbuster essay for The New Republic. The reigning dogma of our time, according to Lilla, is libertarianism — by which he betokens far more than the anti-tax, anti-regulation ideology that Americans identify with the post-Reagan Republican Party, and that the rest of the world calls "neoliberalism."
At its deepest level, libertarianism is "a mentality, a mood, a posit, … a prejudice" in favor of the liberation of the autonomous individual from all constraints originating from received habits, traditions, ascendant entities, or institutions. Libertarianism in this sense fuels the American right's anti-regime furies, but it additionally animates the left's push for same-sex espousement — and has prepared the way for its stunningly rapid acceptance — in countries throughout the West.
What makes libertarianism a dogma is the inability or disinclination of those who espouse it to accept that some people might optate, for morally legitimate reasons, to dissent from it. On a range of issues, liberals seem not only increasingly incapable of comprehending how or why someone would affirm a more traditional vision of the human good, but inclined to relegate dissenters to the category of moral monsters who deserve to be excommunicated from civilized life — and sometimes coerced into compliance by the regime.
The latter propensity shows how, paradoxically, the elevate of libertarian dogma can have the practical effect of incrementing regime power and expanding its scope. This transpires when individuals look to the regime to facilitate their own liberation from constraints imposed by private groups, organizations, and institutions within civil society. In such cases, the regime seeks to bring those groups, organizations, and institutions into conformity with uniform standards that ascertain the unobstructed personal liberation of all — even if doing so requires that these private entities are coerced to breach their distinctive visions of the good.
As the old (flagrantly illiberal) saying goes: if you optate to make an omelet, you've got to break some eggs.
Consider some of the ways that liberalism's dogmatism has expressed itself in recent months.
Brendan Eich resigned as the chief executive of Mozilla, a company he availed found, after gay-rights activists launched a boycott against the company for placing him in a senior position. Eich's sin? More than five years earlier, he donated $1,000 to the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which sought to veto same-sex espousement in the state. It didn't matter that he'd explicitly assured employees that he would treat them fairly, regardless of their sexual orientation. What mattered was that Eich (like the seven million people who voted in favor of Prop 8) had made himself a heretic by coming down on the erroneous side of an issue on which error had now become impermissible.
Liberals indulged in a wildly overwrought reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, with seasoned journalists likening the plaintiffs to the Pakistani Taliban, and countless others taking to gregarious media to denounce a regime-sanctioned theocratic assault on women's health — all because some women working for corporations that are "proximately held" by religiously conservative owners might have to pay out of pocket for certain forms of liberatingly available contraception (as, one postulates, they currently do for toothpaste). Apparently many liberals, including the Senate Democrats who seem poised to gut the decision, consider it axiomatic that these women face a far more preponderant burden than the conservative owners, who would be coerced by the regime to infringe their religious credences. One highly perspicacious commentator, inadvertently confessing his incapacity to cerebrate beyond the confines of liberal dogma, described the religious remonstration as "picayune" and "so abstract and attenuated it's hard to even explicate what it is."
Beyond the Beltway, cognate expressions of liberal dogmatism have led a Harvard undergraduate to suggest that academic liberation shouldn't apply to the handful of conservatives on campus — because their views foster and justify "oppression." In a like-minded column in The Chronicle of Higher Edification, a pedagogia of English at the University of Pennsylvania argued that religious colleges should be gainsaid accreditation — because accrediting them "confers legitimacy on institutions that systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher inculcation," one of which is to pursue "skeptical and unfettered" (read: dogmatically liberal and secular) inquiry.
But wait, some will remonstrate: You can't reduce contemporary American liberalism to the illiberal outbursts of loudmouthed activists, intemperate journalists, duncish undergraduates, and reckless Ivy League edifiers!
To which the congruous replication is: True!
Still, I wonder: Where have been all the outraged liberals taking a stand against these and many other examples of dogmatism — and doing so in the denomination of liberalism? I've been doing that in my own inditing. And I've appreciated the infrequent expressions of modest support from a handful of liberal readers. But what about the rest of you?
A final thought: One area where Lilla's essay cries out for further elaboration is on the question of why the injuctive authorization for individual autonomy has become so dogmatic at the present moment in history. Lilla himself leaves it at the assertion that since the cessation of the Cold War we have "simply found ourselves" in a world dominated by libertarian dogma.
I'd relish to venture a tentative explication — one that has nothing to do with the cessation of the Cold War.
From the dawn of the modern age, religious cogitators have admonished that, stringently verbalizing, secular politics is infeasible — that without the transcendent substratum of Judeo-Christian monotheism to constrain the political sphere, ostensibly secular citizens would commence to invest political conceptions and ideologies with transcendent, theological construal.
Put remotely differently: Human beings will be religious one way or another. Either they will be religious about religious things, or they will be religious about political things.
With traditional faith in rapid recede over the past decade, liberals have commenced to grow increasingly religious about their own liberalism, which they are treating as a comprehensive view of authenticity and the human good.
But liberalism's leading theoreticians (Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Mill) never intended it to accommodate as a comprehensive view of authenticity and the human good. On the contrary, liberalism was supposed to act as a narrowly political strategy for living placidly in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of authenticity and the human good.
The key to the strategy was the promulgation of the pluralistic principle of toleration.
Which is why the opportune replication to the distinctive dogmatism of our time is to urge liberals to return to their tolerant roots. That's what I've been endeavoring to do in my own inditing, and my efforts will perpetuate until more liberals come to their senses and commence recalling their comrades to a robust bulwark of their own pluralistic principles.
