From the late-seventeenth century onwards, recognizably liberal ideas steadily moved to the center of Western philosophical, political, legal, and economic debates. Since that time, the same ideas have been subject to sustained critique from across the political spectrum. If there is anything that unites counterrevolutionary scholars such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt and radical left thinkers like Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, it is their detestation of the strands of liberalism associated with John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and F. A. Hayek.

One commonality marking these critiques is that there is something inherently deceptive about liberalism. Today’s postliberal right often portrays outspoken support for things like liberal constitutionalism, market economies, religious toleration, and rule of law as disguising an underlying reluctance to embrace thick concepts of the good or even a preferential option for moral relativism. On the left and sections of the right, the same liberal commitments are viewed as masking various forms of economic injustice.

To be sure, there are times when some liberals retreat behind mainstays of liberal order to avoid acknowledging unpleasant realities. We see this in many European governments’ hesitations, invariably legitimized by references to tolerance, about addressing in any substantial way the serious threat posed by Islamist violence to their own populations. Such problems have led many to conclude that classical and conservative versions of liberalism lack the type of foundations that would give free societies the inner robustness necessary to deal with serious threats to life, liberty, and civilization more generally.

The Cancer of Bureaucracy

In his response “Unbecoming Europe” to my article “Preserving Liberty in Illiberal Times” that led off this forum, Russell Greene stresses that these challenges have been exacerbated by liberalism’s acquisition of some unfortunate associations that postliberals have capitalized upon. In many people’s minds, for example, liberalism has become linked to what Greene calls the “hard incompetence” that characterizes government in America and Europe.

It is certainly true that, for all their protestations to favor limited government, classical and conservative liberals have proved unable to stop the remorseless growth of the state’s imprint on life in Western countries and the subsequent magnification of government’s inherent inefficiencies throughout the economy and civil society. Even when in power, the same “right liberals” have struggled to curtail the power of state bureaucracies that act in ways that indicate that they regard themselves as responsible to no one but themselves. This failure has helped open the door to power for populists who, in some cases, display little interest in things like due process.

Making the situation worse is that many Western state bureaucracies are presently dominated by people imbued with progressive sensibilities and who have no hesitation about blocking or undermining any government intent on pursuing non-progressive goals. Many classical liberal thinkers have written at length about the problem of state bureaucracies pursuing agendas that have little to do with a society’s general welfare and everything to do with their own self-interest.

But as Greene illustrates, far too many conservatives and classical liberals have shied away from confronting this problem when in government. On the contrary, Greene observes “‘liberalism’ has become associated with the establishment,” and the establishment usually means left-liberalism. Few exemplified this problem more than the British Conservative governments of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. With the exception of Brexit (opposed by most Tory grandees despite the firm Euroscepticism of actual Conservative Party members) and possibly Truss’s 49-day government, all these Tory administrations behaved more like standard-issue European social democrats. Why, many people conclude, bother supporting a party that is only a few clicks to Labour’s right and declines to defenestrate a Civil Service that regards left-liberal orthodoxies as articles of faith? Again, populists and illiberals benefit.

Getting Real

This brings me to the second response to my article. In “Liberal Idealism and Liberal Realism,” Eric Kauffman suggests that problems like unaccountable bureaucracies pursuing progressive agendas underscore the need for a long overdue “conversation within classical liberalism, between idealism and realism.” He then argues that my analysis reflects that of a liberal idealism which puts too much faith in the idea that, given the proper liberal and constitutional framework, a freedom-orientated society will emerge from below as people freely opt for good things that add up to “a high-trust Tocquevillean society.”

Kauffman maintains that classical liberals must be more realistic about the human condition. They need to face up to the fact that leftist ideas are now systematically pervaded by most of the West’s culture-forming institutions. Liberal idealists, Kauffman states, are reluctant to admit that too many “mediating institutions … are hopelessly compromised, lack political diversity, and have been weaponized by woke ideologues.” The same institutions actively stigmatize and, in some cases, seek to destroy anyone who expresses even mildly contrary positions. This means that “spontaneous citizen action in a highly atomized society is difficult, fragile, and insufficient.” The way to deal with such illiberalism, Kauffman reluctantly concludes, is to have “elected governments … intervene to enforce political neutrality and non-discrimination.”

I confess to some sympathy for Kauffman’s diagnosis of a substantive problem in most Western nations today. I also think that some classical liberals have been too sanguine about the cultural rot that pervades so many private institutions. They are also rather quiet when people refuse to kowtow before woke pieties and subsequently find their liberties under assault.

That said, there are good reasons why we should be skeptical about looking to the state to overcome such problems, and those reasons are of the realist variety. The best classical liberal thinkers are those who ground their thoughts about the economy, and government on certain truths about human nature. The writings of figures like Smith, Tocqueville, and Hayek are shot through with deep realism concerning the human condition. They thus reflect the understanding that those leading or working for governments are just as fallible and weak as the rest of us.

That realism is what underlines my conviction that relying upon state power to purge things like DEI programs from private associations is, at a minimum, not optimal. First, there is always the possibility that such powers would be abused by at least some people in right-leaning governments. No one is immune to the temptations associated with the acquisition of more political power. More generally, using the state to tackle such problems would further legitimate government intervention into civil society at a time when the state’s reach into such organizations via regulation and financial subsidies is already pervasive and requires active retraction.

Second, neutrality and non-discrimination can be very slippery concepts. It is worth bearing in mind that ostensive concerns for neutrality and non-discrimination have often been the grounds upon which progressives have tried to use state power to force their agendas upon private organizations. Then there is the question of how state officials would determine what constitutes neutrality, when it has been achieved, and how it is preserved. The opportunities for mischief and the possibilities of error would be considerable. Nor is it hard to see how appeals to neutrality can be weaponized by right and left illiberals to wreak havoc upon many of the freedoms that protect us from arbitrary coercion by the state.

Do Classical Liberals Care about Virtue?

None of this is to diminish the seriousness of the problem highlighted by Kauffman. Too many private institutions, ranging from universities to the boards of art galleries, have been permeated by woke ideologues who have corrupted these formers of culture from the inside out. But those concerned about the rise of illiberalism need to ask themselves a preliminary question, one posed by Michael Lucchese in the third response to my article: why have so many such institutions “proved so weak in the face of illiberalism?”

Lucchese believes that the answer is less to be found in politics than in the realm of morality. While constitutional structures and protocols are vital, he argues, too many defenders of liberty have lost sight of an older tradition: one that holds liberty and virtue together on the basis that: 1) a critical mass of virtuous individuals and communities is an indispensable safeguard for a free society; 2) freedom is an indispensable prerequisite for living a good life; and 3) the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice, is knowable to the human mind. Lucchese describes this outlook as belonging to the tradition of “republican liberality.” This was, he contends, the foundation for self-government as envisaged by American founders like George Washington and John Adams: men who understood themselves as belonging to the party of liberty.

This integration of liberty and virtue is not sufficient to resist illiberalism from the left and right, but it is essential. But do sufficient numbers of classical liberals today understand this and accept what it means? Lucchese is skeptical. I worry that he is right.

One consequence of the rise of left and right illiberalisms is that it has surfaced a long-simmering division among contemporary classical liberals. On the one hand, there are classical liberals who believe that virtues can be known and lived and that this need not imply aggressive state intervention into the private sphere of life. On the contrary, they hold, it puts principled limits on the scope for state action. Other classical liberals, however, give the distinct impression of regarding the idea of virtue as ephemeral at best, as inhibiting social experimentation, or as providing postliberals with an excuse to extend state intervention even further into society and the economy.

When one looks at the classical liberal tradition as a whole, the former position is far more common than the latter. People with impeccably liberal credentials like Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville (both of whom star in Hayek’s pantheon of liberal heroes) did not believe that a people without virtue would remain free for long—not least because the resulting social and political disorder would open the door to the state, often led by illiberals, trying to fill the void.

If the position of these “Acton-Tocqueville” classical liberals is accurate, then the emergence of a free society robust enough to resist right and left illiberalisms involves reconnecting freedom and the good life in a world presently resistant to accepting that the two must go together. Yes, reinvigorating that connection in the minds of sufficient numbers of people may be challenging. Without it, however, preserving free societies from the illiberalisms of left and right will, in the long-run, be near-impossible.