E-Pluribus | August 15, 2024
Liberalism, warts and all; San Francisco's attack on free speech; and liberalism: is it for everyone?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jeffery Tyler Syck: Equality Is Good, Actually
Ben Franklin is credited with saying, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Less famously, Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man expressed a similar sentiment when seeking to avoid a girls who “wants to trade my independence for her security.” Writing at Persuasion, Jeffery Syck makes the point that classical liberalism does require trade-offs (which are worth it), but that we must be up front about what those tradeoffs are to defend liberalism honestly and effectively.
[M]odernity has brought with it more human freedom and material prosperity than at any other time in history. Modern Americans are 90 times richer than the average human being of the past and average net worth has tripled across the globe. Many millions of people have been liberated from tyranny and despotic government since the end of the Second World War.
Yet we liberals should pause before we simply brush off the concerns of those who dislike liberalism—because across the world the anti-liberals are winning the argument, while liberals all too often lose. The reasons for this are complicated. But on the most basic level, liberal setbacks stem from the fact that many liberals seem pathologically incapable of defending their own principles. When reactionaries decry the egalitarian and cosmopolitan world we are living in, liberals cringe and meekly mumble about policy. Instead, liberals must own their strengths in order to allay fears about their weaknesses—they should shout from the rooftop that equality is good, cultural diversity can be important, and self-government is vital to a flourishing society.
Over the years, scholars have traced the origins of liberalism to a variety of moments in history. Some locate the beginnings of liberal principles in Renaissance Italy and the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, some in the rise of the market economies of Northern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and still others in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions.
Regardless of its origins, however, the critiques of liberalism have remained remarkably consistent over time. In particular, right-wing and reactionary critics advanced a set of arguments to discredit the liberal commitment to equality. Though Joseph de Maistre, Augustin Barruel, Patrick Deneen, and Yoram Hazony are different in many ways, their attacks on liberalism stem from a united distaste for modernity.
The best right-wing attacks boil down to this: Liberalism levels all of society. It gradually erodes the natural differences that exist between nations, communities, genders, and so on. This leveling produces equality only in the sense that it lowers all people to a common baseline. The previous peaks of human civilization which achieved fine art and heroic deeds no longer exist. In short, liberalism makes us bourgeois, soft, and weak.
The reality—that many liberals try to deny—is that there is some truth to these claims. Human rights, for example, do require that people be treated the same regardless of local custom. Internationalism does erode the distinctions that exist between nations. Liberal political philosophy does de-emphasize the heroic virtues of the medieval and classical world, and promotes a bourgeois ethic of self-dependence and economic freedom.
Some of these trends lead to genuine problems. For instance, the breakdown of local communities exacerbated by the market and the forces of globalization needs to be addressed. As I have previously argued in Persuasion, the economic hollowing out of middle America has done much to undermine both equality and democracy in recent decades. By uprooting people from their homes and localities, the less positive forces of liberalism have contributed to the listless, unhappy, youth of the modern world. These are problems that require further attention from liberals.
However, the most serious right-wing claim leveled against liberalism—that all its social effects lead to a weaker, unvirtuous humanity—is simply not true. On this front, liberals should spend more time proving their opponents wrong.
Since its very beginning, liberalism has rested its belief in human freedom on the idea that all persons are essentially equal. Abraham Lincoln—with his usual astuteness—argued that the liberal regime of the United States is “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In short, we are a nation whose chief calling is equality through freedom. No serious thinker has ever taken this to mean that all people are equally smart or equally strong. But liberalism does assert that no human being is born superior to another. All humans are born with inherent worth, whatever their differences.
If taken seriously, this concept has a great effect on how society arranges itself. The transformation that liberal egalitarianism has wrought on humanity requires a brief comparison with the pre-modern world.
Read the whole thing.
Ethan Blevins: San Francisco City Council Targets Free Speech To Cover Up Its Own Housing Failures
The government is always coming up with ways to control the speech of citizens which is why, to the founders’ great credit, the First Amendment exists. At Reason, Ethan Blevins brings us an example from San Francisco of how government failure often leads to suppression of freedom.
The San Francisco city council is smashing the mirror because it doesn't like the face staring back at it. The council just approved a ban on websites that offer data about local rental markets and help landlords set their rents. The council blames these tools for exploding housing costs. It's a classic case of killing the messenger that will do nothing to fix a problem of the city council's own creation—and it violates the First Amendment.
Landlords often use websites like RealPage and Yardi that suggest rent prices based on local market data. Recently, activists have started blaming such websites for inflating rents, simply because they provide accurate data about rent in a local market. The San Francisco city council has now joined the party with an ordinance that would ban "algorithmic devices [that] perform calculations of non-public competitor data concerning local or statewide rents or occupancy levels, for the purpose of advising a landlord whether to leave their unit vacant or on the amount of rent that the landlord may obtain from a tenant." Under this ordinance, websites cannot offer such devices and landlords cannot use them.
But these sites offer a valuable service. Prices are signals—they offer crucial information to buyers and sellers that guides commercial decisions, helps businesses and consumers adjust to economic changes, and supports a healthy economy.
[. . .]
Even if these websites might help landlords to collude or fix prices, that does not justify banning information. Under the First Amendment, the government cannot stifle information because it fears what people might do if they're informed. In the 1976 case Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited pharmacists from advertising prescription drug prices. "It is precisely this kind of choice," the Court said, "between the dangers of suppressing information, and the dangers of its misuse if it is freely available, that the First Amendment makes for us."
It's a good thing the First Amendment makes that decision for us, because almost any information—however valuable—can be misused and therefore fall within the crosshairs of hasty lawmakers. Public voting records can be used to intimidate people, real estate listings can facilitate property scams, and public online data can be exploited by identity thieves. Of course, all this information also serves valuable purposes, too. In a free society, the government penalizes misconduct rather than restricting access to information.
Read it all here.
Anne Applebaum, Azar Nafisi, and Henri Barkey: Liberalism Offers a Language of Resistance Against Authoritarianism Everywhere
Anne Applebaum, Azar Nafisi, and Henri Barkey recently participated in a panel discussion for the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. Each panelist was asked to open by describing how anti-liberals get the history of classical liberalism wrong. Excerpts are below:
Anne Applebaum: The place where liberalism starts is in the experience of injustice and the experience of autocracy. Everywhere you look in the world where there is a successful or unsuccessful democracy movement—whether it's in Hong Kong, Iran, Russia—it begins with people who intuitively understand that a state in which a small group of people makes all the decisions, in which the economy is untransparent, in which the legal system and the judges are bought and paid for by people in power, where there isn't rule of law, there's rule by law (in other words, the law is whatever whoever is in charge says it is) … anybody who lives in a system like that understands it to be unfair. That's the starting point for thinking about alternatives. And that was true at the time of the English Civil War, which was the beginning of, “Our system is unfair. Why should the monarch be in charge?”, it was the beginning of that process.
[. . .]
Azar Nafisi: . . . About two decades ago, I had just migrated to the U.S., and after giving a talk at the Women's Foreign Policy Group, a lady came up to me, and before I could say anything, she said, “You're wrong. Women actually like to wear the veil in Iran. It’s their culture.” I really regret not telling her: “If Iranian women love to wear the compulsory hijab, why is it that they welcome flogging and being jailed, tortured, and even killed for refusing to wear it?” And how many times since then have I heard this from politicians, the people in the media, universities, and think tanks: “but it's their culture, you see.”
But if my culture then means stoning people to death, polygamy, female marriage at the age of nine … if that’s what my culture is, then your culture is Inquisition, the burning of witches in Salem, slavery. It is not St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and Moby Dick and James Baldwin and Tony Morrison and W.H. Auden and on and on. If mine is associated with whoever benefits from the Islamic Republic, then yours is fascism and communism.
[. . .]
Iran's Constitutional Revolution [in 1905] was one of the first in Asia, and the constitutionalists fought against both the West's expansionism and hegemony (especially between Russia and England). But they also wanted to become part of a new world. You don't merely export or import values and principles—they need to be needed. That’s how liberalism survives—by other people picking it up. If women in Afghanistan or Iran want to be free to dress the way they want, to appear the way they want, who are you to tell them they cannot? There is a deep condescension in this approach. It tells them, “You are not really made for freedom.” In the revolution, there was an American, Howard Baskerville, who at the age of 24 was shot dead in the city of Tabriz because he was supporting the constitutionalists. The American consul told him that they didn’t want him to be involved, that Americans should not be involved in other peoples’ affairs. His response was, “I cannot ignore the suffering of these people who are fighting for their rights. I am an American citizen, and I am proud of that, but I am a human being, and cannot stop having sympathy for the people of this city. The only difference between me and these people is my birthplace, and that is not a big difference.”
[. . .]
Henri Barkey: I’m a political economist, so I'm going to look at it from a different perspective. I don't believe that you can export liberalism.
When you look at the origins of liberalism in the West, it is essentially the result of two very important developments: industrialization and urbanization. When you look at liberalism in the rest of the world, the liberalism that we see is not really genuine—whether in the Middle East or in Latin America, the liberalism there is really an imitative, mimicking type of liberalism. What these countries saw was that as the West developed and industrialized, industry equaled power. So if you wanted to be powerful, you had to industrialize. So these countries, first and foremost, tried to industrialize first—they didn't try to bring in the values of liberalism. For them, the instrument was industrialization.
[. . .]
[W]hen people talk about liberalism … people have incorrect notions that liberalism really existed in a number of places. In Argentina under Sarmiento, or Benito Juárez in Mexico … those presidents very clearly said, “We are emulating the West. Because we want to be like the West.” It wasn’t really an effort on the part of the West to export liberalism; it was a mimicking, and in most instances it failed.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s a thread on academic boycotts and academic freedom from the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression. FIRE’s Alex Morey and Davidson College Professor Isaac Bailey weigh in, too:
From Parents Defending Education, a Wisconsin public school is focusing on reading, writing and recognizing white privilege:
And finally, Alan Cole is here to debunk misinformation. Click for video (if you dare.)