Centrist or Liberal?

 A couple days ago, the center-left prime minister of Spain suggested that the Moroccan government may have deliberately refused to prevent migrants and asylum-seekers from crossing the border into Ceuta earlier this summer. 

This is a rather odd thing to charge any government with, though, since the last time I checked, it's not the responsibility of any state to hold their own population prisoner within their borders and prevent them from exiting. 

To the contrary, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indicates that people have an absolute right to leave the territory of their country. As Article 13 states: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own[.]"

Other governments can police irregular migration into their borders, subject to the principles of refugee law, but no government is supposed to prevent people from leaving in the first place. 

Of course, plenty of authoritarian regimes in the past and present—North Korea, the Soviet Union, etc.—have tried to bar their own citizens from escaping; but these are generally not held up as positive examples. 

So, if Morocco didn't affirmatively prevent people from leaving their territory—weren't they just following international law and procedural justice? Why would we fault them for it? 

I thought this was an interesting example of something Jerusalem Demsas talks about in the most recent episode of The Argument podcast—namely, the difference between "liberalism" and "centrism." 

Many times in contemporary political debates, the two get conflated. We talk about liberals and centrists and "moderates" interchangeably. 

But if we take liberalism to mean something like "respect for procedural justice"—then a lot of what centrists currently want to do actually violates liberal principles; and a great deal of what liberals believe and stand for is actually considered radical under the current terms of debate. 

Demsas specifically cites immigration to illustrate her point. She notes that many of the ways "centrists" have proposed to "moderate" on this issue in electoral politics are actually profoundly illiberal—involving the restriction and narrowing of procedural rights for asylum seekers, e.g.

Meanwhile, simply to believe something like "current U.S. asylum laws and global refugee compacts that the U.S. government has signed ought to be implemented as written" has apparently become a "radical" viewpoint in recent years. 

When Biden did nothing more than restore access to asylum hearings at the border, for instance, overturning the Title 42 summary expulsion policy that Trump had first imposed during the pandemic, he was roundly attacked by both right-wingers and Democratic "centrists" and "moderates" for supposedly following the radical left advice of "the groups." 

But all "the groups" did (and I was very much a member of them) was to urge the U.S. to comply with its own asylum laws and the UN Refugee Convention. 

We said: under basic rules of procedural fairness, everybody who claims asylum deserves a hearing; otherwise how would you know whether you were deporting someone to torture or persecution? 

Even that basic tenet of procedural justice, though, suddenly put us on the far left of the issue, as it has now been defined. 

Here is indeed a good example, then, of liberalism and "centrism" being at odds. 

Likewise, it appears that to believe in the Universal Declaration's principle that every person ought to have the legal right to leave the territory of any nation, and not be held there against their will, now apparently puts someone to the left even of Spain's relatively leftist current leadership!

I therefore agree with Demsas that principled liberalism means something very different than just tacking to the electoral "center" of any current political divide. 

On the other hand, I agree with Matt Yglesias's counterpoint in the episode as well that there is some logical connection between moderation as a general orientation and the principles of liberalism.

After all—Yglesias points out—one of the defining traits of liberalism is a tolerance of different viewpoints; whereas a tenet of much of the political far left seems to be that the truth is obvious, and that those who disagree with them can only possibly be doing so for corrupt reasons. 

They must to keep their certainty accuse

All that are different of a base intent (to quote Yeats). 

I see both Demsas's point and Yglesias's, and I think there is a way to synthesize the two. 

What we saw above is that liberals can be seen as absolutist and "radical" when it comes to their insistence on full and equal procedural justice for every individual, no matter the circumstances. 

At the same time, the underlying reason why we think that procedural justice is so important is because we believe that a fair hearing for all viewpoints is the only possible way of arriving at the truth—which in turn implies a certain moderation of temper. 

If we truly felt as certain as some ideologues do that we knew exactly the one true policy pathway that would lead to utopia, then perhaps there would be no philosophical basis for allowing the free and equal airing of rival opinions. 

It's only because we in fact admit to ourselves that we are not sure, and that we will always still need frank and open debate in order to find the best path forward collectively, that liberalism makes any sense. 

This is why, as Justice Learned Hand famously put it, "the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right." 

Keynes, in his review of a book by Trotsky, brings out this distinction well. In the work Keynes is reviewing, Trotsky has just been railing about how naive the British left is for trying to use parliamentary methods to reach socialism. 

If they were really convinced that Marxism contained the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they would have no qualms about smashing the state and seizing power, in Trotsky's view. 

Keynes replies that this is probably true—but that that requisite degree of certainty is precisely what we do not have. 

Granted his assumptions, much of Trotsky’s argument is, I think, unanswerable [Keynes writes...] But what are his assumptions? He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved—that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts – the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. 

This brings out better than anything I could write the fundamental difference between liberalism and the far left that Yglesias is describing. 

The far left assumes that we already have a plan—democratic socialism (though in some quarters of the DSA, I'm even starting to doubt how much they mean the "democratic" part as this point)—and that those who oppose it only do so out of class interest—"selfish reasons," as Keynes puts it. 

Michelle Goldberg recounts a meeting she once had with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, for instance, in which he told her: "The only thing that has been driving any support for our opposition has been the $60 million of lies being put on TV."

Goldberg, channeling the spirit of Keynes and the spirit of liberty, in Learned Hand's sense, asked: "Do you really not believe that there are people whose opposition to your ideas, or skepticism of your ideas, is sincere?"

To which El-Sayed replied: "I think there are really quite few."

Like Trotsky, he appears to believe the plan is obvious. Anyone who opposes it therefore it acting out of bad faith. 

The rest of us, I think, are still looking for a plan. We aren't so sure that a plan has already been found. 

As Keynes writes: "We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas [...] The next move is with the head, and fists must wait[.]"

Later on in their conversation, the guests on this podcast episode start to sound like they actually believe liberalism has an alternative plan and a tangible ideal of its own: something to do with globalization and markets. Their liberalism sounds a bit like neoliberalism. 

But that's not my idea of a better plan either. I certainly don't object to markets, but I'm not enthusiastic about them as a panacea either. 

I think people can be—and have been—unjustly sacrificed on the altar of capitalist ideology as often as they have been on that of the gospel of socialism. 

The sense in which I am a liberal is more the sense in which Isaiah Berlin was one: I tend to recognize that there are multiple legitimate values in life that may be in conflict with one another. 

The reason why it is so hard to settle on a single "plan," then, is because any given plan, if pursued maximally and to its logical conclusion, may require the sacrifice of some legitimate values to others. 

Instead of trying to find a single totalistic "plan" then—whether neoliberal capitalism or neoleft socialism—I suggest we aim for what Berlin called an "uneasy equilibrium" between competing values. 

Of course, as one of the other podcast hosts observes, epistemic moderation is not as likely as monistic ideology to excite and mobilize people. 

Berlin, though, acknowledges this and was simply willing to bite the bullet: "A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made?" he wrote. 

"Yet if there is some truth in this view, perhaps that is sufficient. [... T]here is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting."