Liberalism has thus been spectacularly hypocritical – although Fukuyama, for example, is unimpressed by the accusation, arguing that this left-wing critique “does not show how the doctrine is essentially wrong.” The historian Caroline Elkins might not agree. In “Legacy of Violence,” her recent book on the British Empire, she argues that “ideological elasticity” was in fact what made liberal imperialism so resilient. She shows how Britain’s vast judicial system was used to legitimize the violence of its ‘civilizing mission’. What Fukuyama repeatedly calls the ‘essence’ of liberalism is also, Elkins argues, a paradox: emancipation and oppression in one.
But such tensions are less interesting to conservative critics of liberalism, who think it’s all rotten. As Matthew Rose puts it in ‘A World After Liberalism’, the radical right has long regarded it as ‘basically bad because it destroys the foundations of the social order’. The 20th-century extremist thinkers he discusses in his book — including a “fascist scholar” and a “right-wing Marxist” – also mocked Christianity for an egalitarianism and compassion they just couldn’t stand. Yet their critiques have resonated with contemporary arguments from right-wing Christians such as Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen, who blame liberalism for making people complacent and spiritually lazy.
Liberal decadence doesn’t just amount to seduction, but to tyranny – you might believe that when you read the most vocal opponents of liberalism on the right, whose sweeping denunciations can make it sound like there’s a liberal regime forcing women into careers. and forcing them to get abortions. It is remarkable how little the book-length defenders of liberalism have to say about sexual and reproductive rights, while conservative critics have long been fixated on it. Gopnik did warn that if the anti-abortion movement really wanted to do business, it would have to create some sort of invasive “pregnancy police.” He didn’t foresee that Texas would soon find a way to do something even more extreme by putting that power in the hands of citizens—a vigilante-enforced abortion ban, cheaply.
There’s an old essay by feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis in which she said that “perfect liberals” seemed so “emotionally intimidated” by the anti-abortion movement that they didn’t quite know how to talk about it: “Almost everyone I know basically supports legal abortion, but hardly anyone takes the issue seriously.” Writing in 1980, Willis called the anti-abortion movement “the most dangerous political force in the country,” a movement that posed a threat not only to sexual freedom and privacy, but also to physical autonomy and “civil liberties in general.”
Willis pointed out the weaknesses of liberalism and also identified the space it had opened for liberation. She had started out as a rock critic, a woman in a male-dominated field, always aware of the possibilities and limitations of mainstream culture. The late philosopher Charles Mills was similarly attuned to such discrepancies. In books like ‘The Racial Contract’ and ‘Black Rights/White Wrongs’ he scathing critiques of a ‘racialized liberalism’ that kept trying to pretend it was color blind; Mills argued that historically liberalism’s exclusions were so great that they were not mere anomalies, but were clearly fundamental to it.
Still, as he told The Nation in early 2021, “liberalism is attractive on both principled and strategic grounds.” Mills envisioned a liberalism that was harsher and more radical, yet imbued with humility—a sense of how contingent it was. The very experience of subordination and exclusion made him alert to what many liberals did not want to see. He ended an essay for Artforum in 2018 with a warning: “As the anti-Enlightenment comes upon us and threatens another dark age, remember: we told you (and long ago, too).”