Illiberalism on the Rise

America is becoming an “illiberal democracy,” Fareed Zakaria has warned. The same thing is happening in Poland, writes Anne Applebaum. William Galston and William Kristol, who have often opposed each other in political debates, wrote a joint statement expressing dismay that the “basic institutions and principles of liberal democracy are under assault.”

It may come as a relief, then, to read that illiberalism is not on the rise, and, indeed, does not exist. Yoram Hazony develops that thesis in an interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal. Hazony defines liberalism as the view that it is “possible and desirable to establish a world-wide regime of law, enforced by American power, to ensure human rights and individual liberties.”

He says that supporters of this project have adopted “illiberalism” as a catchall term for its opponents, from authoritarian dictators to traditionalist conservatives. He objects to this usage because it smears the latter with the sins of the former — and rationalizes bombing campaigns designed to advance a utopian vision of universal liberty.

Hazony is certainly correct that the term “illiberal” can be used too broadly. Reducing immigration levels and placing restrictions on judicial review may or may not be good ideas, but they are not the same as jailing people for expressing political dissent, and we should not use terminology that obscures the differences. He is right, as well, that we will be tempted to ignore these distinctions if we see a battle between liberalism and illiberalism as the central drama of our politics.

But Hazony’s usage of “liberalism” stacks the deck, too, just in his favor. He is defining it in an idiosyncratic way, as an example of the kind of “armed doctrine” that Edmund Burke assailed. He claims that the West took military action against Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi because they were considered illiberal. He also argues that a foreign policy designed to stamp out illiberalism will find it impossible to select its targets: “In a world full of illiberals, how to choose whether to go after Russia or China? Saudi Arabia or Iran?”

He doesn’t notice the tension between these two points. The second one suggests the falsity of the first.

We didn’t attack Serbia and the rest just because they were illiberal. We went after them, wisely or not, because we considered their illiberal regimes particularly murderous, threatening to our interests, or both.

For Hazony, liberalism’s ambition “to eradicate illiberalism in all its forms” poses even more severe dangers at home. It has no room for the nationalist and religious sentiments that animate many conservatives. “Neither nationalism nor support for religion can be derived from liberal theorizing about universal human rights or individual liberties.” And so, “anyone who advocates nationalist and religious ideas in the wrong circles gets tossed straight into the basket of illiberals, with Messrs. Putin, [Erdogan] and Kim.”

That’s overstated, but I believe Hazony is on to something. It would help, though, if he distinguished between two forms of liberalism.

Let’s take liberalism to refer to a set of political ideas held in common by classical liberals, most modern self-described liberals and most modern conservatives: by, let’s say, the early John Stuart Mill, Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. It refers to the ideas that all people have rights that governments should respect and protect, that these rights include the ability to express their views, that the law should aspire to impartiality, and so forth.

One form of liberalism — we could call it a “rationalist” or “progressive” liberalism — tends to see it as a set of axioms that were discovered during the Enlightenment and that should govern all of human life. For progressive liberalism, politics consists of working out the implications of liberal principles and acting on them. Another form of liberalism, which we might call a “conservative” liberalism, thinks of itself as a set of practices that we have learned, through many centuries of trial and error, are pretty good at promoting human flourishing.

The first kind of liberalism has a totalizing impulse that sets it at odds with religion, as the Jacobin persecutions of the Catholic Church illustrated. The second kind of liberalism, the liberalism of Burke and the Federalist Papers, does not. The first kind of liberalism is impatient with the concept of borders. The second views the nation-state as the indispensable, historically evolved home of liberal democracy.

That second form of liberalism concurs with Hazony that nationalism and support for religion cannot be derived from theorizing about human rights, and goes beyond him: It does not think that liberal institutions and attitudes themselves can be derived from such theorizing. They are rooted in a Western tradition that is intertwined with the history of Judaism and Christianity and the lived experiences of nation-states. By treating only the most progressive forms of liberalism as liberal, Hazony sells liberalism short.

If we take illiberalism to mean the denial of the core beliefs in equality before the law, free speech and so on, then it is neither an incoherent concept nor a term that is serviceable only for slander. We can hold these beliefs without embracing the kind of dogmatic and aggressive liberalism that worries Hazony. And we can acknowledge that much of our politics consists of arguments about how to act on these liberal ideas rather than about their basic soundness.

We can even notice that some of today’s attacks on those core beliefs come from an illiberal Left as well as an illiberal Right. How strong is our commitment to the idea that public speakers should be met with arguments rather than riots? That government should protect the rights of all rather than serve one group of citizens at the expense of another?

We should be as precise as we can with our terms, but illiberalism certainly seems to be real, on the rise and worth resisting.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a senior editor of National Review and the author of “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.” To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.