Culture War Liberals

The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend

"Righteous indignation" by Neil. Moralee is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This week’s column uses the word “liberal” in the European sense of the word - American readers should feel free to substitute “libertarian” or “classical liberal” in their heads

There is a direct line between skepticism and the liberal idea of the open society, where anyone can criticize anything. In a free and diverse society, gathering enough information to set sensible policy will always be challenging. That means devolving decisions down to individuals and families will usually be a better starting position than telling others how to live their lives.

Of course, all models are wrong, including this one. There will be times when we have to cut back on individual freedoms for the benefit of society, whether that is by mandating seatbelts or banning death threats.

Believers in the open society will normally say that the burden of proof should be on politicians who want to cut back on the freedom of ordinary people to live their lives as they choose. There will be times when it has to be done, but we probably shouldn’t let our leaders do it too often or for trivial reasons. There is a risk they might get a taste for it! This approach suggests that liberalism should probably be seen as a good rule of thumb rather than the One True Ideology.

Of course, it is also possible to develop a rigid and dogmatic form of liberalism. This is a mistake in my view: Individuals are not always the best unit of analysis; liberal politicians often struggle to win elections; and taking liberal language too far can make people unsympathetic to those who need a helping hand from the welfare state.

My Twitter friend Orwelliano and I have an ongoing conversation about dogmatic ultra-liberals who become obsessed with fighting “wokeness” (what used to be called “political correctness”) and soon afterwards find themselves on a slippery slope towards a very illiberal end point. It is true that people on the “woke” left can at times seem prickly and quick to take offence; and it is also true that the urge to cancel people is deeply illiberal. While there is nothing wrong with criticizing the excesses of the left, I think that it is a mistake for liberals to enthusiastically join the culture war on the other side.

The first step towards the trenches often involves lumping different groups of leftists together in one big category. A friend on social media who annoys you by insisting on a more thoughtful approach to language might have nothing in common with an anarchist who is rebranding anti-police activism as anti-fascism. Neither might agree with a neo-Marxist social theorist, who uses highly esoteric language to hide a lack of insight. The differences are more interesting than the points of overlap. Lumping them all together and then buying into conspiracy theories about George Soros or the Frankfurt School will yield poor results.

People who get conspiratorial about the left often come across as very angry. Their frustration at what they see as the bossiness of the left quickly leads to negative partisanship. Dogmatic liberals who join the culture war tend to stop being skeptical or moderate.

Meanwhile, treating the enemy of your enemy as your friend is rarely a good idea. Some of the people who shout loudest about free speech are bigots, who resist any pushback on their reactionary attitudes towards minorities. Finding common cause with bigots isn’t a good look; and your new friends might not be quite as committed to free speech as they claim.

We can call an alliance with bigots the Goldwater trap. American libertarian politician Barry Goldwater (a liberal-conservative in European terms) supported racial equality; and desegregated the Senate cafeteria on behalf of one of his legislative assistants, who was black. However, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though he agreed with most of it, because he was worried about the government dictating policies on hiring and firing to businesses. He famously said: “You can’t legislate morality.” He found himself on the same side as Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who had said he would rather die 1,000 times than fight alongside a black soldier in the armed forces.

Looking back on the issue nearly 60 years later, Goldwater’s concerns seem a little trivial. The Civil Rights Act, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ended the Jim Crow laws that had enforced racial segregation throughout the southern states. The new laws gave African Americans more options to live their lives as they saw fit; and the legislation has already joined the list of great liberal achievements over the ages. Even Byrd came to regret his earlier racism.

Culture war liberals who fall into the Goldwater trap in the contemporary world tend to lose something of the essence of liberalism. This is particularly true if they decide to get into bed with the populist right. This side of the spectrum is often a serious threat to liberal democracy, as we saw on 6 January last year when Donald Trump encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol to try and overturn his election loss. The peaceful transition of power is liberalism’s killer app. Let’s not put it in danger just because we think some people on the left can be a bit too bossy about which words other people use!

I would urge people interested in preserving the open society to hold the course with skepticism, moderation and self-awareness. Although “wokeness” can be intolerant at times, we need to recognize that many of our friends on the left are well intentioned. Their concern for under-privileged members of society often has liberal roots: They want these people to be able to choose their own way of life despite adverse circumstances, discrimination and prejudice. We can disagree with the illiberal urge to silence people who criticize inclusive language in good faith, while accepting that the underlying aim of “wokeness” is often a humane one.

Instead of joining the culture war, I think skeptical liberals should focus instead on due process to help our friends on the left clarify their thinking. Inventing and enforcing rules about language use creates new power structures; and power corrupts. So, who gets to decide which language is or isn’t appropriate? If the answer is under-privileged people, then who gets to represent them? What is the process for getting rid of these representatives if they end up taking bad decisions?

Making the n-word taboo has obviously been a success for African-Americans, while the LGBT community has successfully reclaimed the word “queer.” If we have two models (creating new taboos and reclaiming words), how do we decide which one is appropriate in each case?

More broadly, how are decisions on acceptable and unacceptable language taken? Are dissenting voices invited to the table? Are decisions revisited at a later date? Isn’t there a big difference between polite suggestions that one word is better than another and demands that certain old-fashioned words be banned outright? How many years would we need to move between a polite suggestion and an outright ban for the whole of society?

Shouldn’t there be some oversight of the human resources departments who enforce new language rules in the corporate world? Why isn’t there an appeal process for people who think they are being cancelled for using language that only recently became unacceptable?

If we want to go even deeper, is there any evidence that linguistic engineering actually helps the people it is meant to help unless it is accompanied by more concrete reforms? Isn’t there a risk of tokenism if we focus too much on words and not enough on living conditions? If there is a backlash against prescriptive language, couldn’t it hurt the people we set out to help? And wouldn’t it be better to use our limited bandwidth to think about pragmatic solutions to problems like climate change instead of worrying about second-order issues like other people using the wrong words?

I’m afraid I don’t have any answers to conclude this column. However, asking better questions is one of the best ways we have of sharpening our axes, so I will leave it here. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further reading

David Brooks’ wonderful essay on moderation in the New York Times from 2017 is worth reading, bookmarking and re-reading on a regular basis

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.