#liberal values

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Jun 24, 2026

I am frequently told that the word ‘liberal’ has become so confused and contested, and so deeply associated with the (often illiberal) left in the United States, that attempts to defend it as a distinct philosophical tradition are no longer worthwhile. While I generally agree that it is futile to try to reclaim words to their ‘proper’ meaning, liberalism is not simply a word that can be replaced with another word. It is the term for the cluster of concepts that form the philosophical foundations of modern Western liberal democracies. To explain why I believe it remains essential to preserve the concept of liberalism, it is worth taking a historical and geographical look at how liberalism came to be associated with different political positions in different countries and what would be lost if we abandoned the concept altogether.

As a general rule, I believe it is futile to try to hold onto words when their meanings have changed in common usage. Language evolves naturally in response to a variety of pressures to serve the purposes of communicating changing ideas and concepts. I have always argued that if this is reflective of a worrying cultural shift, it is better to engage with the ideas and concepts than to try to remedy the problem by insisting on universal recognition of what the word ‘really means.’ At best, the conversation shifts to a discussion of semantics which does not address the core issue. At worst, one ends up looking like an angry, old man yelling “‘Gay’ means ‘happy’, I tell you!”

When it comes to liberalism, however, we are not talking about a word which could potentially be replaced by another word, but about the cluster of concepts underlying the foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. These include individual liberty, universalism, freedom of conscience, free speech, free trade, freedom of inquiry, meritocracy, equality before the law, support for viewpoint diversity as an engine of knowledge production and conflict resolution, a willingness to live and let live provided this does no material harm to others, firm limitations on state power, a preference for reform over revolution and a democratic system which governs by the consent of the governed.

Once we stop using the word ‘liberalism’ to describe this philosophical tradition, we find ourselves having to list all those concepts individually every time. This makes for rather laborious conversation. In practice, it also risks separating these concepts from each other and losing a sense of the cohesive philosophy which binds them together and defines the modern west.

The fact that ‘liberalism’ is used to define such different positions on the left/right political spectrum in different countries is illustrative of the history of this philosophy. When I speak about liberalism in other countries, the part where I clarify what I am not talking about varies widely. In America and parts of Europe, I have to stress that I am not referring to the left. In Australia and other parts of Europe, I must clarify that I do not mean the right. Liberalism does not belong to either the left or the right but uses of its name for such positions are revealing of what its principles were competing against historically in a particular country.

In countries where the main threats to liberty have been monarchy, feudal systems, nationalism, religious conservatism or traditional social hierarchies, liberals have been the people pushing for reform, civil liberties, secularism and democratic rights. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the left. We see this history in France, Spain and Portugal. It is also very much the case now outside the Western world in religiously conservative countries where people push for religious tolerance, women’s rights and the rights of same sex attracted people. The ‘woman, life, freedom’ protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Morality Police is very much a liberal protest against state authoritarianism.

In countries where strong socialist or Marxist movements emerged, liberals became the defenders of markets, private property, free trade and constitutional constraints on state power. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the right. We see this in Eastern Europe after communism, in Germany, the Low Countries and much of Latin America. Interestingly, we also see this in Australia where the Liberal Party is the conservative party. This is because Australia was established as a British colony after the major great liberal battles had been won. It never had to oppose a powerful feudal order, monarchy or church. Australia did have to deal with powerful rising Labour Movements and consequently the free trade, free enterprise and minimal government interference elements of liberalism emerged most strongly and associated liberalism with the right.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom are interesting cases within this general pattern. The US - the first country to be explicitly founded on liberal principles following its (liberal) revolution against authoritarian state power from England - has retained a strongly libertarian ethos and deep suspicion of state overreach. America has also never had a significant Marxist electoral force. Both its left-wing and its right-wing currents have supported free trade and free enterprise. It has also retained a significantly stronger cultural influence of Christianity than all the other English-speaking countries and much of the West. Consequently, its political conflict has largely been between religious conservatives and progressives within a capitalist framework. As a result, “liberal” came to be associated with the progressive side of politics, particularly after the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

The UK, as the home of John Locke who developed the philosophical foundations of liberal government, Adam Smith who articulated economic liberalism, Thomas Paine who argued for democratic liberalism and John Stuart Mill who synthesised liberty, free speech, individuality and representative government, has a history in which liberalism developed as a distinct philosophical tradition separate from left and right-wing politics. Further, it developed into a significant political force of its own creating a three-way political distinction: Labour (socialism and economic redistribution), Conservatives (tradition and social order) and Liberals (individual liberty, constitutionalism and equal rights). Because liberalism existed as its own political tradition, the meaning remained somewhat clearer than it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, because the UK is currently so deeply tuned into US political and cultural debates, we are increasingly hearing ‘liberal’ used to describe the (often illiberal) left.

What these histories demonstrate is that although the word ‘liberalism’ has come to be used to refer to different positions on the political spectrum in different countries, its underlying function has remained remarkably consistent. Whether liberals were opposing monarchies, feudal system, theocratic authoritarianism, nationalist movements, military dictatorships or socialist states, they were engaged in the same fundamental freedom-oriented project. The specific threats to liberty liberals have found themselves opposing have varied according to time and place and, consequently, came to be associated sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right. What remained consistent was its commitment to individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of inquiry, viewpoint diversity, universalism, constitutional constraints on power and democratic government. The history of liberalism is therefore not the history of a particular faction within the left-right spectrum, but of a long chain of people in different times and places committed to a philosophical tradition rooted in protecting people from authoritarian power and enabling people with different ideas and values to live together peacefully within free societies.

This is why I continue to defend the term ‘liberalism’ despite generally being skeptical of attempts to police linguistic change. If liberalism were just a word, it would not matter very much if it drifted in meaning or fell out of use. Words come and go. Concepts evolve.

The problem is that liberalism is the irreplaceable name we have for a coherent philosophical tradition that binds together an array of political, intellectual, economic and social freedoms. These are not simply a collection of attractive but unrelated values that we can pick and choose from. They form a cohesive system. Each principle supports and reinforces the others.

Once we stop thinking in terms of liberalism, it becomes easier to think of these principles as separable. We begin to imagine that we can keep democratic systems while abandoning freedom of speech, or preserve viewpoint diversity while weakening freedom of inquiry, or uphold individual liberty while expanding the powers of the state into the private lives of individuals. Keeping the concept of liberalism intact and true to its philosophical heritage reminds us that these commitments belong together because they emerged together and have historically succeeded together.

This matters because liberalism is not simply one political philosophy among many. It is the philosophical foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. When conservatives speak of defending Western civilisation, this is surely what they are seeking to defend. When progressives speak of hard-won civil rights victories, this is the philosophical tradition to which they are indebted. We cannot have a society in which conservatives lose sight of what they are conserving and progressives fail to recognise what achieves progress. The institutions, rights and freedoms that many of us take for granted did not emerge naturally or inevitably. They were won through centuries of intellectual, political and social struggle against myriad authoritarianisms. Liberalism was the tradition that united these struggles and articulated the principles on which modern democratic societies would be built.

John Anderson: When we talk about the liberal global order that's prevailed since the 1940s, it's prevailed because America has been strong enough to make sure it prevails.

Konstantin Kisin: Absolutely, and believed in its values, even if you don't like them, right? They believe in freedom of speech. Europeans believe in restricting people's speech so that no one's offended. That's at a governmental level, right? At the moment, that's who you're choosing between. If you're choosing between America, the American administration believes in free speech and is prepared to accept sometimes very unpleasant costs that come with free speech, right? The Europeans want the opposite, right? That's the choice, right? And so this is a question of values.

Anderson: Well, that's right, but there's an even bigger choice that I'm alluding to, and that is that if America loses its global dominance, what will the new order, global order look like?

Kisin: Well, that's what I'm saying, right? Our values are better than the values that would be in place of those values if we were not the strongest civilization. So being strong has to be one of our values. So this sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

And so, you know, this idea that we should walk around and sort of keep ourselves small and, you know, we have this weird thing. I know it's a British thing. Maybe this is a sign that I haven't fully integrated, but we have a debate in this country every time the Prime Minister of the country goes to some global summit on a big plane, and everyone's like, oh, no, he's spending government money. I'm like, no. What, you're saying Xi Jinping arrives on a megabus? This is a game. There's a game being played here, and people will treat you depending on how powerful they perceive you to be, and human beings are very shallow. And if you've got a big plane with the name of your country on it, people tend to respect that, especially people who are not Western and don't have this moronic ideology where the stronger you are or appear to be, the worse you are as a human being. They don't have that. Xi Jinping doesn't think like that, nor does Vladimir Putin, nor do most people in the world. I think you'd back me up on this, John.

Anderson: You're right. You're absolutely right.

Kisin: Having dealt with people in different governments around the world.

Anderson: Yeah, yep, that's right. You know, we don't want braggarts, but on the other hand, we don't want our leaders to look like they're not respected or respectable.

Kisin: No. On an international stage, I think of them kind of like our champion in a battle, right? Do you want somebody who is strong and capable in that role, or do you want someone who's not, as the Americans had at the last election? I think it was as basic a choice as that, frankly,

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By: Lisa Bildy

Published: May 12, 2026

Does anyone understand what “classical liberalism” is anymore? The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal certainly doesn’t. Last month, it tossed out a complaint filed by a former political science professor against Simon Fraser University. He argued that he was passed over for a tenure-track position because his classical liberal beliefs did not align with the university’s demand for ideological conformity to equity, diversity & inclusion (EDI). His case didn’t even get past the gatekeeping stage. Four years after his complaint was filed, the tribunal ruled, without a hearing, that his beliefs were not grounded in a cohesive and recognized political philosophy and that there was no reasonable prospect of success.

This is the philosophy that shaped the modern West. But it’s apparently not one that the tribunal, or SFU, recognizes.

According to the decision, issued on April 15 but released publicly on May 7, Dr. Joshua Gordon’s early research focused on the sort of class-based concerns for social justice that used to preoccupy the political left: affordable housing for the working poor, the role of labour unions in building a robust welfare state, and so on. But that’s not what passes for acceptable research in today’s academic environment: ‘activist EDI’ requires the use of critical‑theory frameworks that sort people into identity groups and demand adjusted outcomes based on group hierarchy rather than individual merit or economic class. In a pluralistic society like Canada’s, this sort of thinking is corrosive.

In setting out the parties’ positions, tribunal member Devyn Cousineau noted that Dr. Gordon “describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, who supports ‘mild EDI’, meaning ‘a liberal commitment to eliminating overt forms of discrimination and systemic barriers.’” That was the sole mention of classical liberalism in the entire decision. She could not properly characterize Gordon’s opposition to ‘activist EDI’ as classical liberalism – a coherent political tradition with centuries of scholarship – because she appeared to have no conception of it.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Universities have spent decades marinating students in identity-based theories, and those graduates now populate the institutions that shape public meaning: media, law, education, and the public service. Meanwhile, Marxist educator Paulo Freire’s revolutionary “praxis,” drawn from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has seeped into K–12 education, mobilizing students to view and transform society through the lens of oppression. Classical liberalism, seen by the critical theorists as an ‘oppressor ideology,’ is no longer on the syllabus.

Classical liberalism emerged during the Enlightenment as a political philosophy centred on individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, equality before the law, and limits on state power. Drawing on earlier traditions of rational inquiry and constitutionalism, it dismantled hereditary privilege and group‑based legal hierarchies by insisting that each person possesses inherent dignity and must be treated as a rights‑bearing individual. It is the only political philosophy that treats the right to free speech as inviolable. These principles became foundational to modern Western institutions and offered a way to restrain our tribal impulses by grounding political order in universal legal equality rather than in the claims of groups or castes.

But group rights are all the rage today, and along with them an intolerance for any expression to the contrary. Despite Dr. Gordon’s strong teaching evaluations, his “responses with respect to EDI” were deemed insufficient by the activist Faculty Group – five faculty members who opposed his appointment and held enough votes to sink it. Their concern? Gordon’s statement indicated that he treated people equally, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation. That is no longer acceptable. Under activist EDI, one must not treat people equally; one must treat them unequally, according to a shifting hierarchy of “marginalized” identities.

This hierarchy is unstable and often incoherent. Gay men who do not identify as “queer,” or non-white individuals who hold conservative or classical liberal views, can find themselves reclassified as “oppressors.” The logic is political, not principled.

Critical theory rejects the core assumptions of the classical liberal legal order: equality before the law, individual rights, and Enlightenment rationalism. Within this framework, disagreement is treated as harm, and dissenters are viewed not as interlocutors but as obstacles to justice. The result is an ideology that cannot tolerate dissent and that must correct, exclude or sanction those who reject its premises.

Gordon’s affidavit described his worldview as prioritizing equality over equity, colour-blindness, individualism over group rights, and open inquiry over ideological policing. That political worldview has a name – classical liberalism. But according to Cousineau, it lacks “the necessary cohesion and cogency” to qualify as a protected political belief under s. 13 of the Code.

Interestingly, she concluded that the activist EDI orthodoxy embraced by the Faculty Group is not a cohesive political belief either. When an ideology becomes so pervasive that it is simply “the water everyone swims in,” its political nature can become invisible to those enforcing it. When everything is political, nothing is.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: May 9, 2026

I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.

This comment was made to me by one of my readers who has always expressed her commitment to liberalism very strongly. She is a staunch defender of individual liberty. She does, however, tend to disapprove of me criticising other people’s deeply held beliefs. She is not alone on this. At least once a month, I am asked why, if I am such a strong defender of freedom of belief, I cannot just leave other people’s beliefs alone. I think this misses a core feature of liberalism.

Liberalism is, at root, the commitment to letting people believe, speak and live as they see fit provided this does no material harm to anybody else nor denies them the same freedoms. It is a commitment to individual liberty which requires allowing other people to be wrong.

This can lead some people to believe that a commitment to liberalism is a commitment to moral or epistemological relativism - everybody having their own factual truths and ethical principles which must all be respected as equally valid. This is false. One can be a relativist and uphold the central liberal principle of leaving other people alone unless they are harming anyone or imposing their values on them, but relativism is not part of the liberal philosophical tradition.

Liberalism, emerging from the Enlightenment, is rooted in a tradition that values evidence, reason and robust debate. To see this clearly, it helps to separate two core commitments within liberal philosophy:

1) The right to believe, speak and live as one sees fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedom.

2) The idea that beliefs matter, that some ideas are better than others and that we can determine which these are through a marketplace of ideas in which bad ideas can be beaten by better ones.

These are not at all incompatible. They are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. This is, arguably, set out most clearly by John Stuart Mill in Chapter Two of On Liberty. Mill first argues that any attempts to control the expression of ideas is an assault on individual liberty:

I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

He then explains why this matters for truth:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Liberalism protects the expression of even widely rejected ideas not only as a matter of liberty, but because without this protection, truth and falsity are decided by whichever orthodoxy is dominant at the time. Individuals are denied the opportunity to evaluate ideas for themselves, tested against their strongest opposition.

If an idea is wrong, allowing it to be expressed and challenged publicly is the best way to demonstrate that it is wrong. If it is suppressed, all that is established is that those in power dislike it. This can increase its appeal, particularly when those in power are unpopular or distrusted by large swathes of the population. Driven underground, the ideas are insulated from criticism and grow more extreme in unchallenged communities. This is a breeding ground for bad ideas.

If an idea widely held to be wrong is actually correct, enabling people to argue for it publicly and address criticisms of it publicly is the best way for it to be shown to be correct. Allowing people to be wrong is a precondition for discovering what is true.

For this reason, we should be wary of any authority or movement that seeks to shield its ideas from criticism. Either it lacks confidence that its ideas can withstand scrutiny, or it lacks respect for individuals’ capacity to judge for themselves.

These are foundational principles of the liberal philosophical tradition and moral or epistemological relativism play no part in them. If beliefs did not matter and truth were relative, we would lose a primary liberal reason to defend free speech or open debate. Liberalism works because it combines individual liberty with a commitment to truth-seeking.

The claim that liberalism entails relativism is often made by authoritarians who cannot understand how one might believe some ideas are bad without seeking to ban them. If we cannot persuade them of the intrinsic value of liberty, we may at least persuade them that suppressing ideas is unlikely to eliminate them and likely to strengthen them.

More interesting, however, is the opposite mistake. Some anti-authoritarians, deeply committed to individual liberty, conclude that liberalism requires refraining from criticising others’ beliefs altogether. They believe that liberalism should embrace relativism and that not doing so is intolerant and thus illiberal. They feel that, unless somebody is imposing their views on other people, it is presumptuous, interfering or even authoritarian to tell someone we think their belief is false. This is claimed to be at odds with the ‘live and let live’ ethos of liberalism and is often criticised in a tone of “Can’t we all just get along?”

Where drives this stance? In some cases, it reflects a genuinely relativist position: the belief that objective truth either does not exist or cannot be known. This is a Counter-Enlightenment stance held by a tiny subset of liberals, interestingly most commonly found among libertarians. (Those who want to see what a libertarian postmodernist looks like might be interested in my friendly conversation with Thaddeus Russell).

More commonly, in my observation, disapproval of criticising others’ sincerely held beliefs comes from an epistemologically woolly humanitarian stance underlain by what Moral Foundations Theory identifies as the ‘care/harm’ foundation. This moral driver is more pronounced in progressives and works by considering, first and foremost, what makes people feel included, cared about and protected from hurt. While this can manifest in authoritarian ways, such as the censoriousness of the Critical Social Justice movement, it can also exist in the non-authoritarian way of simply believing that it is unkind or intrusive to criticise other people’s beliefs and kind and considerate to respect them.

Jonathan Rauch offers a useful taxonomy of principles for discerning what is true which is relevant here:

• The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right. • The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect. • The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration. • The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt. • The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

The Simple Egalitarian Principle combined with the Humanitarian Principle is, I believe, what best explains most incidences of anti-authoritarians expressing disapproval of liberals (or anyone) criticising the sincerely held beliefs of other people. The Simple Egalitarian Principle constitutes the epistemological base but the moral driver for taking that stance is the Humanitarian Principle to cause no hurt. In Rauch’s view, the humanitarian principle can work in tandem with any of the other principles except the liberal one to establish truth via public criticism. Truth-seeking is inevitably painful. It is also, however, important.

Why is the truth important? Consider the statement which inspired me to write this piece. “I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.” I would suggest this relies upon inherently atheistic assumptions. Religions make claims not only about how we should live in this life and treat other people but also about how to achieve eternal salvation and avoid eternal torment. That does seem like a rather important thing not to be wrong about! If you understand that someone might carefully research a pension plan to ensure that their final years are comfortable, you should understand why they’d pay at least as much attention to their eternity. People who don’t think it matters whether the claims of any religion are true or not tend not to believe that any religions are true.

Religious believers frequently think other people’s religious beliefs matter. For example, a Christian might answer my reader’s question with, “Because Christ is the way to salvation.” It would not be reasonable to expect someone who believes there is one path to salvation and cares about their fellow humans to accept that it does not matter if they take it or not. We just require them not to badger them about it and to leave them alone if asked to do so. Likewise some atheists believe not only that the claims of religion are false and that this matters but that many religious beliefs are harmful and that the world would be a better place if people stopped believing they know what the divine creator of it wanted. (I am one of these.)

Both of these sets of people are likely to object to the claim that it should not matter what other people believe provided they do not impose it on anybody else and respond that caring about this is part of caring about other people. They would likely raise the issue of harm that can result from holding false beliefs. This applies much more broadly than religion and has recently most prominently been argued in relation to the concept of gender identity, antisemitic conspiracy theories and science-denialism in the realm of health.

It can be convincingly argued that people believing things that aren’t true is harmful to society which functions better and more ethically when more people’s beliefs correspond with reality. False beliefs frequently result in misguided actions that harm the actor and potentially others too. Unchallenged false beliefs can be taken at face value by others who are then wronged by having been misled. Also, people holding false beliefs in a non-authoritarian, harmless way still contribute to normalising those beliefs and making them more popular, increasing the number of people who will act on them in authoritarian and harmful ways.

Because the central tenet of liberalism is that only the prevention of harm to others justifies coercion, it has been essential to maintain a very high bar for what constitutes harm and keep it to that which is both material and direct. It cannot include the expression of subversive and/or false beliefs even when the vast majority of people would agree that their spread is being/would be detrimental to society and human wellbeing. As discussed above, this not only denies individual liberty but is unlikely to effectively reduce the popularity of the ideas. Also, occasionally, the purveyors of ideas considered subversive are right. The way to effectively demonstrate that this is not the case and defeat the bad ideas is to facilitate a culture which is positive towards robust and vigorous public criticism of all by all.

However, I would suggest that we don’t even need the justification of preventing potential harm or the pragmatic argument that knowing what is true enables effective action to defend criticising the deeply held beliefs of others. It is legitimate to care about truth for its own sake. It is legitimate to care about how we determine what is true, put energies into discovering what is true, remain committed to testing what we believe to be true and to make sound, reasoned and evidenced arguments for what we believe to be true and address criticisms and counterviews. It is legitimate to enjoy this. For many, the pursuit of truth is not merely instrumental but is a value in itself, and often a source of intellectual pleasure. Arguing, testing ideas, refining beliefs are not experienced as aggression, but as highly enjoyable and, yes, respectful engagement.

I have argued before against the belief that it is respectful and considerate to validate everybody else’s beliefs and feelings and refrain from pointing out when you think they are wrong or unwarranted. This, to me, feels very much like humouring people and to be condescending and disrespectful. I would much prefer people to assume me to be someone who cares about what is true and, if I am wrong about something, to be given the opportunity to stop being wrong.

It is, nevertheless, clearly true that many people do not enjoy engaging in arguments about their own beliefs or anybody else’s. They may be less interested in addressing questions of truth, more conflict-averse, or simply occupied with other priorities. Far from experiencing argument as enjoyable, they may experience it as intrusive or hostile. They would prefer to go through their lives not questioning anybody else’s deeply held beliefs or defending their own. This is a perfectly valid preference. It seems likely that both dispositions are part of human variation and consequently that nobody is likely to be convinced that they should enjoy engaging in vigorous debate if, in fact, they do not or that they should not enjoy this if, in fact, they do.

It is probably highly beneficial that we always have some people who want to argue stridently about matters of truth and ethics and more people who wish to do no such thing. If everybody was a dedicated arguer, daily life could become quite exhausting. If nobody was, we’d never advance any ideas or uncover any errors. How do we manage this? The simple solution would seem to be for those who want to discuss and debate ideas to do with each other and leave everybody who does not wish to do this alone. Alternatively, those of us who who wish to make arguments can do so in writing and publish essays which other people can comment on or respond to or simply ignore.

The solution is: Argumentation with consent.

A liberal society protects not only the right to express and challenge ideas, but the right to decline engagement. Written into the concept of “the marketplace of ideas” is that it is not compulsory. You may enter the market. You may leave it. You may stay at home and read a good novel or go for a walk and smell the flowers. Nobody can force you to go to the market and display your wares or buy anybody else’s. Other people, however, must remain free to do so in your absence. As I have argued before,

There are some who will not accept other people’s right to decline to argue with them or to disclose their stance on any issue or even consider the possibility that they may not have a stance. They will accuse others of being evasive and hiding their true position which is assumed to be problematic. They may insist that not taking a stance on their particular pet issue is a dereliction of duty or even that ‘Silence is violence.” Silence, however, is not violence and such people are illiberal ideologues who are failing to appreciate the principle of free speech which includes the freedom to remain silent and to ignore the speech of others.

There are also the ‘debate me, bro’ types who erroneously think that if anybody expresses a belief, they then have the responsibility to defend it with evidence and argument. This is not the case. The burden of proof only applies if you are trying to prove something in a debate situation. If you are not, you can just mention that you believe something and leave it there. The fact that you have mentioned being, say, a Christian or an atheist does not commit you to proving that God does or does not exist to anybody else. If anyone asks you to do so, you can say, “But I don’t care whether you believe me or not” and go away.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Jan 20, 2026

Humans, as a species, are messy. We are quarrelsome and individualistic, yet tribal apes. Consequently, we insist on having our own minds and disagreeing with each other and factionalising over it. The kind of ape we are is big-brained and capable of complex thought so the societies we build and the issues we fight over are correspondingly complex with multiple layers and many grey areas.

Humans, as a species, dislike messiness. We crave order, consistency and comprehensible frameworks that guide how we understand things and direct us in what to do about them. This trait of forming models to understand and navigate our world has served us well and given us a level of control over it not found in any other species.

This paradox in which we are a complicated and messy big-brained species which dislikes complexity and mess combined with our evolutionary history as social mammals which band together into tribes in competition with other tribes to thrive, survive and procreate presents some challenges.

Historically, human societies have mostly been hierarchical, ruled by a dominant moral orthodoxy with a simple story about who we are and what we must do: warlords, monarchs, dynasties, theocracies. Because we are quarrelsome and factional, none of these arrangements has ever satisfied everyone. Sooner or later, the ruling regime is toppled and another takes its place, usually in bloodshed.

How Liberalism Broke the Cycle

Liberalism broke this cycle more effectively than anything before it. It worked by accepting humans as they are: big-brained, complicated, disagreeable, individualistic, and tribal. Instead of trying to suppress those traits, it channelled them. Liberal societies protected individual liberty, created space for productive disagreement that fuels knowledge and conflict resolution, and developed democratic systems of government by consent. They have never done these things perfectly, but they have done them far better than regimes that are not liberal democracies.

Liberalism’s great strength is that it accepts and accommodates human messiness. In this way, it works better with human nature than any system that has ever existed. This rests on a simple definition of success: a society that allows ordinary people to live and raise families without enduring constant tribal warfare or submission to the dictates of rulers.

Yet the expansiveness and pluralism that make liberalism strong are also what make it vulnerable. A common criticism is that it lacks a vision of the ‘common good’ or a shared moral framework that many people crave. Liberalism offers no fixed answers or direction. Instead, it allows individuals to ask their own questions, shape their own answers, and choose their own paths, requiring only that they not impose their views and values on others.

Liberalism flourishes in times of stability, when people recognise the value of its pluralistic framework that allows for and mediates disagreement. In times of insecurity, however, our craving for order, certainty, and cultural conformity is more easily triggered. When threatened, people become inclined to seek the comfort of simple frameworks and shared narratives. They turn more readily to religious, traditional, or ideological stories, retreat into tribal groups, enforce conformity more harshly, and view outsiders with deeper suspicion. In such conditions, strongman leaders and authoritarian solutions often gain appeal.

In times of instability, people often blame liberalism’s freedom-centred pluralism for the messiness of human societies rather than recognising that societies of humans are inherently messy and that liberalism is a framework that accepts this reality and works to mediate it and resolve conflicts without violence. Critics see liberalism as too open and accommodating, and accuse it of having failed, usually because an authoritarian movement has arisen despite its existence. They insist that only their own brand of authoritarianism can suppress the rival one. History suggests otherwise. Humans consistently respond badly to authoritarianism, and every authoritarian regime has had a limited shelf-life. Yet each insists that theirs will be the one to tame social tensions and end culture wars. This is, in effect, a “Real authoritarianism has never been tried” argument.

In reality, liberalism — at its root, opposition to authoritarianism — has never and can never facilitate the rise of authoritarianism. Critics often point to the authoritarian tendencies of Critical Social Justice on the left, illiberal identitarian populism on the right, or Islamism, as if liberalism failed to prevent them from gaining cultural power or provided the grounds in which they could flourish. But none of these movements arose from societies that were strongly protecting individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, or viewpoint diversity. They arose where those protections had become weak or inconsistent and where illiberal ideas were met with complacent tolerance until they gained dominance.

It is not that liberals, (or defenders of individual liberty and democratic processes who do not refer to themselves as liberals, although they are) failed to recognise these ideologies as illiberal. They did. The problem is that too few people were willing to oppose them consistently across political divides.

This brings us to the urgent question: how can liberalism survive, regroup, and remain principled in the face of rising demands for neatness, certainty, and control that so easily slide into support for authoritarianism? I hear from more and more liberals who feel anxious, even despairing, about this. Yet the role of liberals has always been clear: to oppose authoritarianism in whatever form it arises. And it rarely arises in just one.

We are now living through a particularly troubling wave of illiberalism on many fronts. On the left, we have seen the authoritarian Critical Social Justice movement. On the right, illiberal strands of the “anti-woke” reaction often overlap with populism. Both are marked by postmodern or post-truth disregard for truth, and by attempts to impose their own vision of a “common good” on everyone else.

Tensions over immigration and Islam’s cultural compatibility with liberal democracy have also spiked. At their illiberal edges, these debates fuel ethnonationalism in the UK (sometimes drawing on postcolonial theory) and Christian nationalism in the US. Internationally, conflicts over Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine are polarising Western societies, with evidence that Russia is deliberately working to destabilise liberal pluralism. Meanwhile, the UK continues to see state interference with free speech, and in the US, constitutional rights and democratic processes face threats from the Trump administration. Attempts to defend liberty consistently are hampered by deep political polarisation.

These are exactly the conditions that drive people to retreat into tribal groups, cling to simple frameworks and shared narratives, and be drawn to authoritarians who promise solutions — at the cost of both principles and liberties. For many liberals in the West, this feels like the most unstable period in living memory, with more authoritarian movements demanding opposition at once than we have ever faced before. We, too, feel the pull of clear-cut moral principles to guide us. And the sheer volume of ideologically motivated bullshit, fallacious reasoning, and reality-resistant truth claims we are bombarded with is immense.

Where Is the Line?

It is essential to recognise that a drive for principled consistency and ethical clarity is not only compatible with liberalism, but indispensable to it. The danger lies not in seeking clarity, but in looking for simple, blanket rules in fabricated ideological narratives that deny reality and human psychology. The challenge is how to pursue ethical consistency while respecting freedom, tolerating disagreement, and accepting human messiness. As one of my thoughtful commenters wrote:

I have a bit of a libertarian bend and generally subscribe to the “live and let live”. What I grapple with is that sometimes there are things which don’t harm me in the here and now, but if they get normalised they would harm society (by my reckoning) in the long run. For e.g., if someone holds beliefs I find abhorrent, I agree that unless they break a law they can think and believe what they want. But if they raise their children with those same beliefs and preach to others, they will eventually impact the society my family and offspring will one day live in. Where do we draw the line of giving people autonomy as their beliefs aren’t “harming” any one else? What if the harm is being planted in seeds that will bear fruit later? I don’t know the answer to this.

This is a common refrain. “Where do we draw the line?”

The line for the liberal is always between these two clauses:

Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit // provided they do no material harm to anybody else nor deny them the same freedoms.

This does not make things simple. There are always grey areas about what can be considered to constitute material harm and about what represents a legitimate threat to freedom. Where is the line between the expression of hostile views about a particular group and incitement of violence against that group? At what point does an illiberal religious or political worldview that we must counter with argument become an extremist movement radicalising people into committing harmful actions such that membership of it constitutes conspiracy to commit harm? Are some ideas so productive of direct harm - Islamism, Nazism, the medicalisation of children as ‘trans’ - that excluding them from public institutions is simply a matter of safety?

Where is the line between freedom of speech and targeted harassment and abuse? When does an action stop being an exercise of freedom of association, consumer choice or legitimate protest and become illiberal organised political cancellation? How can we decide when an employer has exercised their own freedom to fire someone for their speech based on a legitimate risk to their reputation and when the risk has been created by political activists to pressure them to do so? When can we understand a mass response to a controversial statement as legitimate criticism that enables bad ideas to be beaten by better ones and when is it a social media ‘pile-on’ that functions to disincentivise further dissent and chill free speech?

There simply aren’t self-evident lines that can be neatly applied to every issue but this does not mean liberals cannot have principled consistency. We cannot realistically create a master flowchart that considers every variable in every case and situation. If we attempted that, we could never get everyone to agree with it. We have to accept the reality of human messiness while being consistent in our principles and thoughtful about how we navigate it. I will suggest one form of fallacious argument that we should not allow ourselves to be sucked into and five things we can bear in mind while addressing specific issues from a liberal perspective. (There will be many more and I encourage you to share them in the comments).

One thing we should absolutely not do is accept that the existence of complexity and messiness justifies creating illiberal blanket rules that target people expressing unpopular, offensive or politically inflammatory stances, but not causing direct and material harm. We are currently seeing a surge of fallacious reasoning that goes like this: “I can think of a somewhat comparable example in which you would agree that banning or punishing someone was reasonable and not authoritarian. Therefore, you have no grounds to object to me banning or penalising things contrary to my political beliefs. And if you object, you must also reject the first example.”

Examples presented to me include:

If it’s reasonable for an employer to fire someone for saying black people are too stupid to be employable, then it’s also reasonable to fire James Damore for saying men and women differ in interests on average.

If we don’t let people walk around entirely naked, then we can also ban them from covering their hair.

If it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove explicit violent or sexual content from school libraries, then it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove books accurately depicting historical slavery or referencing the existence of gay people.

If it would be reasonable for fire an engineer for wearing a KKK hood at work, it is reasonable to fire him for dangling his hand from his truck window in such a way that his figures form a gesture which has been associated with white supremacy.

If it is a matter of safety to fire a hospital employee who called for another Holocaust while being responsible for preparing food for Jewish people, then it is also a matter of safety to fire a Home Depot worker who joked about wishing an assassin’s bullet had not missed Trump.

If it is reasonable to ban fetish gear that exposes genitals, then it is also reasonable to ban men from wearing dresses.

If somebody raises one of these comparisons in good faith, it can be worth pointing out the crucial differences: between claims of racial inferiority and claims of psychological sex differences; between gratuitous portrayals of violence and accurate depictions of history; between intention and accident; between established decency laws and individual expression which do not contravene them; between a credible threat to safety and a tasteless joke.

In most cases, however, people making such false equivalencies are not interested in these finer points or considering issues thoughtfully on a case-by-case basis. They are deflecting to a different issue where censorship or penalties are more defensible because they cannot easily defend either in the case in question. One can spend half an hour explaining why the cases differ, only for one’s interlocutor to switch to a new “comparison” and accuse you of being immoral or stupid for not conceding. The aim is to exhaust and overwhelm good-faith challengers and discourage further debate.

If you do choose to engage, the best move is to reverse the demand: If they are unwilling to defend their authoritarian stance on the issue in question specifically, they should make a strong case for the equivalence they are claiming, because it is not apparent. If they really believe, for example, that claims of psychological sex differences in interests are equivalent to claims of racial inferiority in capabilities, they must explain how race is equivalent to sex, how interests are equivalent to capabilities, what evidence supports either claim, or why political agendas should take precedence over evidence. It is their responsibility to do the work of making a strong case for banning anything.

Dishonest authoritarians often try to use our concern for truth and principled consistency against us. We do not need to let them. If they wish to persuade us, they must come with evidence and reasoned argument.

Five Things to Bear in Mind

Quite a lot of messy complexity can be navigated by holding core premises, principles and strategies in mind. Here I suggest five.

1. Banning things does not work.

There is a common idea that liberals are idealists. Some critics say we are radical individualists who value freedom at all costs, indifferent to social consequences. Others dismiss us as woolly elitists who think that if we sit around explaining things reasonably for long enough, we can convince people to stop being authoritarian and all the problems will go away. Either way, the charge is that we are unserious about real problems.

Individual liberty is something that should be supported for its own sake and on principle. However, there is also a strong pragmatic argument for liberalism. Banning ideas has never worked. It doesn’t make them disappear. It drives them underground, gives them the glamour of forbidden truth, and leaves their adherents free to present them unchallenged within alternative spaces. By keeping bad ideas speakable, we can expose, debate, and discredit them. That is the only way ideas have ever died: by losing support in the court of public opinion.

People who think that banning ideas can make them go away would do well to look at the UK. Under the influence of Critical Social Justice, gender-critical and anti-immigration views were heavily penalised. People were fired, arrested, threatened, and no-platformed. Five years later, the UK is now dubbed “TERF Island,” and Reform, running on an anti-immigration platform, has surged in the polls, destabilising the two-party system. Whether or not one welcomes these developments, they demonstrate that attempts to ban ideas frequently serves only to strengthen them.

It is particularly frustrating as a liberal to have it frequently assumed that we oppose the banning and penalising of ideas because we do not realise how harmful ideas can be or because we agree with the ideas and want them to thrive. Sometimes liberals can fall into this error themselves and agonise over whether they really should set aside their support for freedom of speech in the face of a particularly egregious idea. This makes intuitive sense but does not work in practice. The opposite is true. It is precisely when ideas are most harmful that we need them out in the open, where they can be confronted, resisted, and stripped of power. This is not naive idealism. We do it because it works.

2. Think in Terms of a ‘High Bar’ rather than blanket rules or simple lines.

Because humans are complicated and messy, the societies we build and the ethical dilemmas we face are also complex and multi-faceted and a variety of views on them will always exist. We are not always able to set out theoretical frameworks that cover every eventuality and potential manifestation of every issue and draw clear lines that cover every possible variable.

We can, however, think in terms of having a very high bar for banning things and stick to the ‘harm’ principle. In the liberal conception of society, individual liberty is the default position and anybody who wants to say, “No, you may not say or do that” has the responsibility to make a strong and convincing case that unambiguous, material harm has been caused or will be caused by tolerating the beliefs or actions in question. That is; people are not expected to prove that they should be allowed to say or do anything. Those who think they should not be allowed to say or do it are expected to demonstrate harm if they want to justify coercion. In the words of John Stuart Mill,

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise.

If the case for harm cannot be made, there is no justification for coercion. This does not mean accepting that the beliefs or actions do not present a problem or succumbing to moral or epistemological relativism and accepting that everybody has their own equally valid ‘truth.’ It means that the job of dispatching those ideas and associated behaviours remains in the realm of discussion, critique, argument and persuasion, not in the realm of state or social force.

3. Hold Ourselves to a High Standard

It is common now to hear people deplore the state of society and opine that liberalism has failed because illiberalism still exists and is increasingly gaining positions of power and prestige. “Where is this liberal society?” they ask, forgetting that they are society and failing to introspect honestly about whether they have been upholding liberalism.

Too often, we are inclined to think in top-down ways of society as a thing we live in and which owes us certain rights and freedoms rather than a thing we are and which we create with the culture we develop and the principles, norms and expectations we establish. As we get increasingly anxious about a certain manifestation of illiberalism on a political side which is not our own or which threatens our own values or way of life, we become prone to tolerating or condoning illiberalism on our own side or which does not threaten our own values or way of life. Then we outsource agency to political leaders and activist groups whose illiberal stances we don’t really support while speaking and behaving in ways which embolden them to become more illiberal.

It can feel futile, idealistic or naive to try, as an individual, to push back at rising surges of illiberalism by being visibly, vocally and consistently liberal, but if we want to live in a society where our individual liberty is respected, that is what we have to do. There is no other way. Liberalism cannot be established by illiberal means. We can all hold ourselves to high standards of ethical integrity when engaging with others and be thoughtful about how we are doing so. Ask ourselves, “Am I offering strong but legitimate criticism or am I trying to help cancel someone because I hate their political views?” “Am I being consistent or am I doing something I recognised as censorious when people on the other side did it to people who share my views?”

This can be more impactful than we might think. Every person who stands up for the freedom of belief and speech of someone with whom they disagree impacts a circle of people around them, influencing those who share their political views to do so in a more consistently principled way and checking those who are asserting them in illiberal ways, while making those who take an opposing view more inclined to return that favour. At the least, they do not contribute to the escalation of illiberalism and polarisation. We know from other social movements, including, most recently, the Critical Social Justice movement, that a relatively small proportion of people can significantly impact culture if they are vocal, visible and organised. The majority of us still hold liberal principles, but hold them passively as an expectation. We can each play a part in re-activating them.

4. Really Accept Human Complexity and Messiness

We humans, despite being messy and complicated, typically strongly dislike mess and complication. We crave order and simplicity. Further, we seem to expect it and believe that we can socially engineer it. Despite no society of humans ever in the history of our species having achieved a state in which everybody held the same beliefs, values and goals, we are constantly surrounded by factions of people who believe that they can and must get everybody on-board with their vision of shared values or a ‘common good.’

Despite having just lived through the Critical Social Justice movement’s attempts at this which included a multi-billion dollar industry to retrain employees’ unconscious minds and a multi-faceted Cancel Culture, many on the illiberal right now tell us that the problem was that we do not face enough social pressure to have shared values and a sense of the common good. They argue that we need to return to a society dominated by religiously or socially conservative beliefs, racial and religious homogeneity, restrictive gender roles and intolerance of sexual minorities. Not only will this not work to reduce differences of opinion and factionalism (as someone with an academic background in Christian history in England, 1300-1700, I can assure you of this), it will not work at all, because humans do not work like that and do not tolerate that. The ‘anti-woke’ backlash against the woke movement we now see is a clear example of this and it is foolish and blinkered to think there won’t be an anti-anti-woke backlash if its illiberalism continues.

Our tendency to have strong and differing opinions and factionalise over them exists in our evolved ape brains and cannot be addressed by socially engineering our environments to reduce differences. We can only work with the disagreeable aspects of our human nature by setting up systems which allow for people with different opinions to hold them, express them and live by them while committing to not imposing them on anybody else and settling disagreements via healthy and productive verbal debate rather rather than tribal warfare and democratic processes rather than successive authoritarian regimes. This governing system is liberalism.

Despite so many of us seeming to know this on an intellectual level and hold ‘live and let live’ values, we still seem to find it counterintuitive on a deeper level and this is intensified when we feel ourselves to be under threat. At these times, we are inclined to be drawn to authoritarian rhetoric and strongman political leaders as though they offer us some kind of protection. They do not and are, in fact, most likely to lead us back to times of tribal warfare and authoritarian regimes. To resist this, we have to fully appreciate the messiness and complexity of humans and consequently human societies and fight for the liberal governing system that works with that reality.

5. Do Not Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

Liberalism becomes unpopular in times of heightened anxiety because it does not offer simple answers, blanket rules, clearly delineated ethical frameworks or a shared vision of the common good. This is a feature, not a bug. Liberalism is the governing system and ethical framework that has best advanced knowledge and enabled people with different ideas to live together and resolve conflict without bloodshed not because it is tidy and simple and perfect and provides all the answers, but because it’s the only one that works with the chaotic wiring of actual humans and enables them to find their own.

While authoritarian systems of government and societal norms provide a great number of “You musts” and “You must nots,” liberalism, at its root, has only one “You must not” which concludes with ‘harm other people or impose your own values on them.” This rule applies to the government and so protects individual liberty and enables government by consent of the governed. It applies to the law and so protects individuals from physical harm or theft of property. It applies to institutions of knowledge production and so facilitates open inquiry and the advance of knowledge. As a social norm, it enables tolerance and co-existence while also protecting people’s right to strongly disapprove of and criticise those who have different views and engage in robust and productive debate without violence.

This is not to say that we live in a society which is actually doing all this well! We are not currently doing it well and probably never will do it perfectly. There is always illiberalism and threats to or denial of individual freedoms within governments, laws, institutions of knowledge production and among different factions of humans living together. We are not a particularly liberal species. We are, however, a species capable of envisioning liberalism, setting up systems to facilitate it and getting a significant majority of people to commit to accepting their own right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, while not harming anybody else or denying them the same freedoms. The countries which have done this are known as liberal democracies and they are the most prosperous, advanced and pleasant places to live the world has ever known.

Liberals will always need to exist because illiberalism will always exist. It is our job to be alert to the rise of authoritarianisms and uncompromisingly assert that one “You must not.” We have not been doing very well at this in recent years and so we have seen the rise of unchecked authoritarian factions on the left and the right and in the form of intolerant Islam. This is not a reason to give up on liberalism and embrace whichever authoritarianism seems the least threatening. It is a reason to reinforce liberalism and be stronger in our defences of it while also recognising and being appreciative of the degree of individual liberty our societies still afford us. We may never achieve a perfect degree of liberalism in all spheres of life, but society works far better and is a much more pleasant place to live in when we hold this as an aim than when we do not.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Jan 13, 2026

In a recent piece on whether the terms ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’ mean anything anymore, I argued that a stance can be coherently and measurably recognised as ‘far’ - extreme, radical - when it is unambiguously illiberal. That is, when it denies the fundamental principles underlying liberal democracy - individual liberty (individualism), viewpoint diversity (pluralism) and universal rights and responsibilities and democratic processes (universalism). This provoked a lot of (mostly positive) discussion, and two comments stand out.

Connie, a relatively new contributor to our discussions with an academic background in philosophy, writes,

It’s been bothering me for a while that I keep getting nudged back and forth on the left-right political spectrum, while my general political perspective has pretty much remained the same over the years. Today I’m questioning whether it should even be a spectrum with a “center”. Helen’s walk-through of the diverse real-life manifestations of left and right is a good argument for changing the whole framework. I’ve long thought that Libertarianism belongs on some kind of narrow orthogonal offshoot from the spectrum. Perhaps “conservative” and “progressive” need a different kind of framework than a two-dimensional line.

There is, of course, the very useful “Political Compass” test which plots people on a graph that measures both their left-wing and right-wing views and their authoritarian or libertarian values.

I see things a bit differently, however. I see liberalism less an axis different but equivalent to the left/right one and more as a higher-order value. This is because liberalism is the precondition for productive political disagreement. Because Western liberal democracies are founded on liberal principles as a governing system and (ideally) a set of well-established cultural norms and expectations, this provides the core basis for our kind of democratic societies that protect individual liberty and facilitate the free exchange of diverse viewpoints for the purposes of knowledge production and conflict resolution. It can be imagined as an umbrella that covers the majority of mainstream political thought as a default. Those extreme views on the fringes of either side which would curtail individual liberty, suppress viewpoint diversity and interfere with democratic processes and/or the constitutions of countries established to protect individual liberty and government by the consent of the governed are the views I have argued can coherently be considered extreme, radical or far. These are revolutionary or reactionary views which seek to dismantle the liberal, philosophical underpinnings of Western modernity and replace them with some Utopian vision of progress or a regression back to an imagined golden time of patriarchy, racial and religious homogeneity and persecution of sexual minorities.

If we imagine an well-functioning liberal society in which the vast majority of people on both the left and the right strongly support individual liberty, viewpoint diversity and value our shared humanity and the radical views which do not are marginalised to the fringes, it would look something like this:

(N.B. This does not mean that liberalism is the same thing as ‘centrism’ but that when a society is overwhelmingly liberal, liberal principles are organically at its centre. We can imagine a society in which the mainstream conservative views are illiberal - perhaps an Islamic theocracy - and the progressive stance opposes this and then the liberal umbrella would cover much of the progressive side of the spectrum and very little of the conservative side. Likewise, in a society where the mainstream left-wing views were illiberal - maybe a Marxist state - and those on the right are in opposition to that, the liberal umbrella would cover most of the right-wing spectrum and very little of the left).

I expressed this to Connie like this,

I’m inclined to think of liberalism as a “higher order” value that covers the things we must preserve before we can meaningfully have political sides that can engage in the tug of war over progressive or conservative policies, large government or small, taxes, housing, welfare programmes, international relations etc. If we don’t have a society that protects individual liberty & democratic processes and facilitates the free exchange of diverse viewpoints effectively to advance knowledge and resolve conflict, the people who make all those decisions will ultimately be whichever authoritarian faction is able to gain power. This is why I think it is in the interests of everyone to defend liberalism.

One of our regular thoughtful commenters, Neil, then responded,

Defined as a higher order value, then, Helen, you’d define liberalism as “protects individual liberty & democratic processes and facilitates the free exchange of diverse viewpoints effectively to advance knowledge and resolve conflict”? Whilst I’d agree, the counter point is that our current ‘next level down’ political parties would all be likely to claim these are already part of their core values?

Yes! Exactly! This is precisely what we want and we need to focus on this specifically and hold political parties to it. We need our political leaders to affirm these core values very explicitly to preserve the functioning of our liberal democracies. By keeping the core liberal principles front and centre as well as left-wing or right-wing policy positions, liberal leftists and liberal conservatives can consistently hold their political leaders accountable for upholding these and have a measure by which to marginalise their illiberal extremists through internal critique. As we get increasingly politically polarised on right-wing or left-wing party politics, it is easy to let slide the fundamental liberal principles that all inhabitants of liberal democracies should be invested in maintaining.

The fact that political parties in power claim to uphold liberal values even while failing to live up to them in many ways in practice is precisely why liberals need to be vigilant and consistently principled, but it does give us a solid basis to work with. We frequently fail to do so because we get so distracted by the (important) specific policy decisions at hand that we miss the bigger picture, which is the foundations of liberal democracies themselves.

When Keir Starmer was confronted by an elected MP asserting that it should be made illegal to desecrate holy texts and insult prophets and he prevaricated on this by saying that the government was committed to tackling all forms of hatred, the political right noticed the failure to uphold freedom of belief and speech but the discourse on left was dominated by discussion of anti-Muslim bigotry and immigration. We needed liberals from both sides to say, “No, Prime Minister, the correct and immediate response to that should have been “Sorry, Mr. Ali, but no. While criticism or mockery of religion can be experienced as hurtful by believers, we must protect the right to do so in a liberal society.” When Donald Trump threatened to remove the licences of TV stations that are consistently critical of the Republican Party and his administration, the left pointed out the threat to freedom of belief and speech but discourse on the right was dominated by discussion of the bias of the channels in question and whether this was just revenge for left-wing censorship. The liberal response to that from both sides needed to be, “No, Mr. President. I’m sure you meant to say, “I don’t like those channels but I will defend their right to exist and criticise the government in the spirit of the constitution of our great country. I encourage everybody to consume a variety of news sources.”

Political leaders frequently express their commitment to liberal values while betraying them. Paradoxically, perhaps, the continued expression of those values is a good sign! Political leaders clearly believe that the people still expect this of them. Our aim must be to show them that they are correct about that and do so particularly with our own parties. We must also be prepared to do this with the members and supporters of our own side. We get the political leaders we ask for and so it matters that the prominent and mainstream voices on each side uphold those foundational liberal principles, and illiberal extremists are recognised as such and relegated to the fringes. They still have a voice and can contribute to the conversation but the commitment to liberal democracy holds.

The strongest critics of liberalism on the left are the Marxists and the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement. Contrary to narratives on the right (and occasionally on the left), these are not the same thing. Marxist critiques of liberalism have (since Marx) been economic. They are materialists who believe in objective truth and the importance of dialectic, but have a radical and single-minded focus on the source of societal injustice. Marxists object to capitalism which is a central pillar of liberalism and read everything through a class-based lens that holds that the wealthy use capitalist systems to consolidate power in their own hands and exploit the working class. They typically reject identity politics as dividing the working class and distracting from a focus on economic systems.

The Critical Social Justice (woke) movement is very much embedded within capitalist & corporatist systems but may pay lip-service to anti-capitalist rhetoric. They oppose liberalism on epistemic and moral grounds, taking the postmodern stance that rejects the concept of objective knowledge and the later evolution of that which holds that identity politics are required to achieve social justice. “Critique of liberalism” is a central tenet of Critical Race Theory and also features heavily in Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Intersectional Feminism and Dis/ability studies. Activists typically believe that individualism and universalism are White, Western, masculine concepts that perpetuate oppression.

Both of these radical factions embrace collectivism and reject the concept of individual liberty where it contradicts their own ideology. Contemporary Marxists are generally more open to engaging with diverse viewpoints while ‘wokeists’ believe that social justice can only be achieved by censoring ‘dominant discourses’ (common ways of talking about things) seen as perpetuating oppression and instilling their own into everybody. Their attitudes towards democratic processes and constitutional procedures are variable and complicated. In the case of the CSJ movement, they are often incoherent. It is the ‘woke’ who have presented most direct illiberalism by gaining power and prestige both within institutions and culturally via mainstream media and social media, resulting in the Cancel Culture which hit a peak in 2020 and has been waning ever since but has not died.

Liberals on the left need to engage with both groups, but we must not be distracted from their illiberalism either by our sympathy for some of their aims or by a conviction that the illiberalism on the right is worse and so we need to maintain solidarity and not “punch left.” Marxists make some good critiques of some aspects of capitalism and of class power and of the ‘woke’ that we should take seriously. The Critical Social Justice movement is not wrong that cultural discourses have power and biases that affect marginalised people exist, and we share their opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia etc. We can incorporate any insights they might have without giving any quarter to illiberal methods - censorship, collectivist moral coercion, inconsistent principles, rejection of universalism and equality under the law etc. The illiberal elements on the left - overwhelmingly the woke - continue to have power and influence because the liberal left failed to push them back. Political leaders adopted their illiberal stances and rhetoric because the demand for it was so loud and equally vocal internal critique was lacking. We must change that ratio.

The strongest critics of liberalism on the right are the post-liberals, the reactionary and far-right and the post-truth identitarian populist right. It is more difficult to pin these right-wing currents down precisely in this piece because they vary from country to country to a greater extent than Marxists and the ‘woke’ do. Conservatism always varies culturally because conservatives are seeking to conserve different cultural norms and traditions and this remains the case with the far-right. The illiberal right in the UK has decidedly different features to the illiberal right in the US, for example. Nevertheless, we can distinguish three distinct dominant currents.

The “post-liberals” are a mixed bag (and this tems can also be argued to describe some currents on the left). Many on the right root their values in religion while others focus more on cultural tradition and imagined homogeneity (a particularly prominent difference between the US and UK). Some overlap strongly with what is often referred to as ‘paleoconservatism’ while others still operate within largely liberal conservative assumptions and some are radical revolutionaries. What they have in common is a perception of moral emptiness, social fragmentation or excessive individualism and a drive to regain a sense of community, authority, a common good and shared values. They conclude that liberalism has failed and needs to be replaced, but may be vague about what that replacement will look like in practice. They are characterised by dissatisfaction and often a kind of nostalgic longing.

The far-right, reactionaries, Christian Nationalists and/or ethnonationalists are much the same as they have always been. These are the movements that are overtly illiberal and rather than believing liberalism to have failed, were always fundamentally opposed to it. They are overtly hierarchical in a way that is not compatible with liberal democracy, hostile to pluralism and viewpoint diversity and unapologetic about restricting individual liberty. They endorse all or some mix of ethnonationalism, racial or religious supremacy, a patriarchal social order and the persecution of sexual minorities.

The post-truth, identitarian populists are the most prominent and politically powerful illiberal group on the right and they are worrying (and distinguished from broader populist movements) because they draw on both other groups and overlap with them, calling on the disillusioned, nostalgic myth-making that appeals to the post-liberals and the identitarian illiberalism that appeals to the far-right. The post-truth, identitarian right mirrors the epistemology of the postmodern left in favouring ideological narratives over objective truth, largely disregarding any need for evidenced and reasoned argument and using identity politics and “lived experience” arguments and engaging in moral relativism and motivated reasoning. This is a direct rejection of the epistemic underpinnings of liberalism which values pluralism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas as a way to advance truth and thus presupposes that objective truth exists and can be obtained via reasoned and evidenced argument.

Liberals on the right need to engage with all these groups. They too will need to be careful not to be distracted from the illiberalism on the right by sympathy with some of their legitimately conservative aims and resentment at the illiberalism on the left and a feeling of needing to give them a ‘taste of their own medicine.’ Some conservatives have been expressing the view that the right needs to maintain solidarity to see out the excesses of ‘wokeness’ and urging others to see ‘no enemies on the right.’ This is the same mistake as that made by liberal lefties that allowed the CSJ movement to gain dominance in the first place. It is vital that liberal conservatives vocally oppose those on their own side who are hostile to liberty, seek to suppress dissent, reject the concept of truth-seeking and demonstrate contempt for democratic constraint. If we lose the liberal principles that define Western liberal democracies, it will be unclear what, if anything, traditional conservatives are seeking to conserve.

In the case of far-right reactionaries, this engagement must be strong critique that shows their stance to be thoroughly illiberal and enables it to discredit itself and be marginalised from the range of conservative thought considered worthy of respect.

Conservatives who wish to conserve liberal democracy need to engage seriously with the dissatisfaction and nostalgia of the post-liberals, some of whose critiques are serious and historically informed and convince them that a rejection of liberal foundations risks repeating pre-liberal errors. There is no time in which a society of humans has been ideologically homogenous and held to a shared sense of the ‘common good.’ Instead they have factionalised and factions have fought to assert their own value system and impose it on everybody else before being knocked bloodily aside by another. It is the liberal principle of freedom of belief and speech that enables people to live according to their own beliefs within their own religious or moral communities.

They must engage too with the post-truth, identitarian populist right and be seen to argue visibly and well for the importance of understanding ‘truth’ as ‘that which corresponds with reality’ and reality being best established by evidence and reasoned argument rather than by what conforms with ideological narratives. Liberal conservatives need to assert traditional conservative values that have always included holding consistent, reasoned principles and incremental reform and valuing individual responsibility, self-restraint and civility. This is a philosophical tradition that has no room for base collectivist identitarianism and crass and vulgar showmanship, anti-intellectualism and “strongman” posturing. If right-wing illiberalism is not visibly pushed back by ethical conservatives, illiberal political leaders will only be further emboldened to believe they are meeting a demand and become more illiberal and continue to undermine the liberal foundations of the Western Civilisations that conservatives typically seek to conserve.

To achieve all of this, it is essential that liberals on the left and the right hold their liberal principles at the forefront of their minds while discussing the goals, aims, values and policy decisions of political parties and leaders. We must also do so when addressing the public political discourse generally and the various illiberal factions that have influence, especially on social media. It is not sufficient to do this only when illiberalism is evident on the other side. It is essential to accurately critique our political opponents but this can be easily dismissed as political partisanship even when it is not. We are most effective when we address illiberalism on our own sides and doing so honestly and consistently also enables us to work cooperatively and respectfully with liberals across the political spectrum. Only ever criticising one’s political opponents increases polarisation and enables radical and extreme views to thrive. Criticising one’s own illiberals and extremists recentres mainstream political discourse within reasonable, ethical and liberal bounds and decreases polarisation.

It is in this way that liberalism is best understood as a higher-order value - a precondition for societies in which productive and ethical political disagreement can flourish. To preserve our liberal democracies, we must preserve the epistemic foundations of liberalism which hold that objective truth is obtainable and the best way to access it is via evidenced and reasoned arguments between people who disagree and whose right to disagree is defended by strong protections for freedom of belief and speech.