The premise underlying these convictions was that all humans, at all times, sought, above all, the recognition of their intrinsic worth as individuals and protection against all the traditional threats to their freedom, their lives and their dignity that came from state, church or community.
This idea has generally been most popular in relatively good times. It flourished during the late 19th and early 20th century before being dashed by World War I, the rise of communism and fascism, and the decline of democracy during the 1920s and 1930s. It flourished again after the end of the Cold War. But it has always been an incomplete description of human nature. Humans do not yearn only for freedom. They also seek security — not only physical security against attack but also the security that comes from family, tribe, race and culture. Often, people welcome a strong, charismatic leader who can provide that kind of protection.
Liberalism has no particular answer to these needs. Though liberal nations have at times produced strong, charismatic leaders, liberalism’s main purpose was never to provide the kind of security that people find in tribe or family. It has been concerned with the security of the individual and with treating all individuals equally regardless of where they come from, what gods they worship, or who their parents are. And, to some extent, this has come at the expense of the traditional bonds that family, ethnicity and religion provide.
To exalt the rights of the individual is to weaken the authority of the church and other authorities that presume to tell individuals what they must believe and how they must behave. It weakens the traditional hierarchies of birth and class, and even those of family and gender. Liberalism, therefore, cannot help but threaten “traditional values” and cultures. Those are maintained either by the power of traditional authorities or by the pressures of the community and majority opinion. But in a liberal state, the rights of the few, once recognized, supersede the preferences of the many.
In Europe and the United States, this has meant the breakdown of white, Christian cultural ascendancy as liberalism has progressively recognized the rights of people of color; of Jews and Muslims; of gays and others with sexual orientations frowned upon, if not forbidden, by the major religions; and, more recently, of refugees and migrants. Liberalism is a trade-off, and many have often been unhappy at what was lost and unappreciative of what was gained.
Liberalism at war with itself
Liberalism has thus always been vulnerable to anti-liberal backlashes, especially in times of upheaval and uncertainty. It faced such a backlash in the years between the two world wars and during the global economic depression. In 1940, liberal democracy looked to be on its last legs; fascism seemed “the wave of the future,” as Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote at the time.
Liberalism faces a backlash again in the present era of geopolitical, economic and technological upheaval. In such times, many people focus on liberalism’s shortcomings, the things it does not provide and the things it either weakens or destroys. The thing liberalism does provide — security of the individual’s rights against the state and the community — is easily taken for granted or devalued. Even in the United States, the one nation founded on the principle of universal rights, the public has supported the restriction of rights in times of perceived emergency, whether justified or not. In other nations where experience with liberal democracy has been brief and shallow, and where nationalism is tied to blood and soil, it seems almost inevitable that political forces would emerge promising to defend tradition and culture and community against the “tyranny” of liberal individualism.
That is the backlash mounting across the globe, and not only among the increasingly powerful authoritarian governments of Russia and China, but also within the liberal democratic world itself.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been in the vanguard, proudly proclaiming his “illiberalism” in standing up for his country’s white, Christian culture against the nonwhite, non-Christian migrants and their “cosmopolitan” liberal protectors in Brussels, Berlin and other Western European capitals. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s liberal institutions in the name of Islamic beliefs and traditions.
Within the democratic world, there are alliances forming across borders to confront liberalism. In his 2018 book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” influential Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony urged unified resistance by all the “holdouts against universal liberalism,” the Brexiteers, the followers of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Hindu nationalists of India, as well as the increasingly nationalist and illiberal governments of Poland and Hungary — all those who, like Israel, “wish obstinately to defend their own unique cause and perspective” against the “proponents of liberal empire,” by which he means the U.S.-led liberal-democratic order of the past 70-plus years.
And, of course, the United States has been experiencing its own anti-liberal backlash. Indeed, these days the anti-liberal critique is so pervasive, at both ends of the political spectrum and in the most energetic segments of both political parties, that there is scarcely an old-style American liberal to be found. But regarding the authoritarian resurgence that is altering the world today, the most significant developments are occurring among the United States’ conservatives. Just as the American left once admired international communism as an opponent of the capitalist system it deplored, a growing number of American conservatives, including those in charge of U.S. foreign policy, find themselves in sympathy with the resurgent authoritarians and proponents of illiberalism.
TOP: Volunteers of the right-wing Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, in Meerut, India, in February 2018. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images) LEFT: Supporters of far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in Villepinte, France, in May 2017 — a week before Le Pen lost the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron. (Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images) RIGHT: A pro-Brexit protester near the Parliament in London in January. Britain faces a March 29 deadline for its exit from the European Union, approved by voters in a 2016 referendum. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
The anti-liberal critique has always resonated with at least some strains of American conservative thought. There has always been a tension in American conservatism. As Post columnist George F. Will once observed, the “severely individualistic values” and “atomizing social dynamism” of liberal capitalism invariably conflict with the traditions of community, church and other institutions that conservatives have always valued. At times, some conservatives have questioned the “whole concept of universal natural rights” and have sought to ground American democracy in a particular cultural and political tradition. Instead of defending the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they have defended tradition against the destructive power of those principles. This was a different idea of American nationalism, and it was inevitably bound up with questions of religion, race and ethnicity, for it was about preserving the ascendancy of a particular cultural and political tradition which happened to be white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.
From the early 19th century onward, a consistent theme in American history has been the fear that an Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States was being threatened both from within and from without — from within by the calls for the liberation and enfranchisement of African Americans, and from without by the influx of non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant immigrants from Ireland, from Japan and China, from southern, eastern and central Europe, and later from Latin America and the Middle East.