At the outset of his 1993 book The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, the political theorist Stephen Holmes observes that he is "not worried about the practical consequences" of the anti-liberal theories he explores in the book. At the time he was writing, he says; "[t]hey benefit from historical circumstances that make them politically harmless," he observes.
I have no doubt that this was largely true in the democratic West in 1993. It was certainly something I myself believed the first time I encountered the ideas Holmes describes. As even these illiberal thinkers appear to believe, liberalism seemed so much in the ascendant that it could not seriously be endangered—and therefore its critics could only serve, if anything, as a healthy corrective to its myopia.
However true this may have seemed two or three decades ago, however—it is quite obviously not the world we live in anymore. Many of the New Right intellectual currents associated with the Trump movement trace their origins to the thinkers Holmes discusses in his book. Even if Trump himself may be too ideologically incoherent to ever classify, a figure like J.D. Vance is plainly a self-conscious product of the "communitarian" anti-liberal school; and he flits willingly—depending on his audience—between both the "hard" and "soft" versions of anti-liberalism that Holmes describes.
Since these ideas have only become more influential and politically powerful since Holmes wrote his book, it's worth trying to revisit and understand again exactly what their beef with liberalism really amounts to—as they are not often willing to spell it out themselves (for reasons that will shortly become obvious).
An oft-repeated refrain from both "hard" and "soft" critics of liberalism (in Holmes's terms) is that liberalism supposedly lacks any substantive ideal of the good life. Instead, it invites people to pursue their own idiosyncratic definitions of the life well lived, and thereby leads to social "atomization," moral relativism, and a kind of spiritual anarchy.
This is a rather baffling criticism, however, since—by their own telling—liberalism leaves the anti-liberal perfectly free to pursue their own substantive definition of the good life. Liberalism (and let us take if for granted we are talking for now about political liberalism, rather than "comprehensive" liberalism) does not forbid anyone—even an extreme religious conservative or fascist—from living however they wish to, and in accordance with whatever ideal, in private life.
All liberalism does is to say that the government is not permitted to impose by coercive force any particular substantive definition of the good life on its citizens.
Many anti-liberals will say that this misses the point, because their substantive definition of the good life cannot be realized by each of them in isolation, but requires community to bring it about.
Here again, though, we point out in response that political liberalism does not forbid anyone from living in voluntary communities or engaging in collective efforts to advance a shared vision of the good life. Liberalism merely says that the organized violence of the state is not going to get involved in order to back some of these endeavors over others. The government's coercive apparatus will remain neutral between them.
This is the point at which the anti-liberal says something like: "yes, I know that's how political liberalism is supposed to work in theory; it is supposed to leave room for people to work out their own religious soteriology and communitarian aspirations in the private domain; but in practice what always seems to happen is that the ideas of liberal individualism somehow filter down from the public domain into the private sphere, and people stop signing up for our project of conservative religious community."
Inescapably, then, the anti-liberal's critique of liberalism always seems to boil down to a complaint that liberalism gives people too much freedom. It won't let them coerce people into participating involuntarily in their substantive project.
As we've just seen, after all, nothing in liberalism prevents a religious conservative from going off and founding a community based on their religious tenets, and inviting other people to join them. Their complaint, then, seems to be that so few people in modern society seem to want to join or stay in these kinds of communities, when given freedom of choice in the matter.
And so, the true core of the anti-liberal's objection to "modernity" seems to be precisely that it offers people this choice, instead of simply forcing them into the involuntary social ties that the anti-liberal believes—according to their own substantive definition of the good life—are in their own best interests.
The anti-liberal therefore necessarily has to believe that the state or some other coercive apparatus ought to compel people to participate in a community organized around their substantive definition of the good life against their will.
This approach is also inherently anti-egalitarian, let it be noted, since it believes that the state should back with force the substantive definition of the good life of one group of citizens over another, who are not able to successfully promote their ideas through techniques of nonviolent persuasion and propaganda. It therefore requires us to believe that some group of citizens is more inherently worthy of imposing their substantive ideals than others.
After all, if extreme religious groups were able to win and keep enough converts through the sheer attraction of their ideas, they would have no difficulty whatsoever pursuing their communitarian ideas under conditions of political liberalism. They seem to want not only to be allowed to propagandize for their faith, then—which liberalism does not prevent them from doing—but also to impose it upon the majority without their consent.
The "hard" anti-liberals Holmes discusses are—to their credit—often fairly blunt and forthright about this. A figure like De Maistre would simply bite the bullet on his support for clerical despotism.
The people who are much more frustrating are those Holmes aptly dubs the "soft" anti-liberals—figures like Ross Douthat who make sweeping and incendiary claims against "liberalism" in general, but who—when asked whether they would forgo any specific tenet of the liberal project, become suddenly very evasive and hard to pin down.
It's never been clear to me that there is a single liberal right that Douthat wants society to forfeit (freedom of the press? freedom of speech? freedom of religion? Douthat ostensibly appears to embrace them all); and he would blanch at the accusation that he shares the anti-egalitarian premise diclosed above—even though it is an inescapable implication of anti-liberalism.
This was apparently a feature of "soft" anti-liberal thought even before Douthat. As Holmes described the typical mode of argument of the "soft" anti-liberal: "After total criticism of the ontological foundations of liberalism and dire warnings about the collapse of Western civilization, we are treated, say, to limp advice about tightening up pornography laws. This belated retreat into harmlessness is a sure sign of 'soft' anti-liberalism."
It's almost like he had just been reading a Douthat column—even though that would not have been possible in 1993. The masters at whose feet Douthat learned clearly adopted the same practice. A typical Douthat argumentative progression will be something like:
(1) Liberalism has ruined society and deprived life of meaning by embracing an ideology of atomistic expressive individualism; (2) maybe we could address this by making sure marijuana use remains criminalized; (3) but actually, it's probably a bad thing to criminalize marijuana because mass incarceration is a serious problem, so maybe the liberals are actually right on this issue too. But they're right about it in the wrong way somehow! (How exactly is never spelled out. Many liberals are even more concerned about mass incarceration than Douthat is.)
The conclusion for the "soft" anti-liberal is always that everything about liberal modernity is bad, but they can't point to anything specific about it they would change, or explain how they would do so, or why doing so would be a good idea. And as Holmes puts it, "To condem a social order as irredeemably rotten in the light of wholly unrealizable ideals is not necessarily useful. It makes no sense to develop a style of social criticism that sounds deep and even 'metaphysical' but has nothing to do with possible solutions[.]"
J.D. Vance has been willing to go much further than Douthat, in ways that have obviously made his former friend uncomfortable. As mentioned above, Vance can sometimes sound like just another "soft" anti-liberal like Douthat, when he is addressing The View or packaging his message for the NPR-listening public. But I believe his true ideological core is as a "hard" anti-liberal; and this is the side of him that comes across whenever his audience is that of a typical right-wing bro podcast, say.
Since we brought up "manosphere" podcasts—can we be real for one second about what's actually going on here, in all this argument about "liberalism"?
Many of the anti-liberals, especially those of the "hard" variety, often hanker quite openly for some imagined patriarchal past, when women had fewer legal rights (the same going for slaves, serfs, "the lower orders," etc.). Their ideal seems to be that of the Roman pater familias, who enjoyed absolute despotic power over the life and limb of their spouse, slaves, and children.
Of course, once again, there is nothing at all in political liberalism to prevent them from going off to found a commune or a compound somewhere where they put this lifestyle into practice, so long as they find others willing to voluntarily participate in the "submissive" roles. They are perfectly free to play petty tyrant in their household if they can find a woman who wants to play along. And as the current "tradwife" movement shows in our society, there are in fact women willing to sign up for such a program.
The rest of us may not see such an unequal arrangement as compatible with human dignity or self-respect for either side of the transaction—but we can't and won't stop them from living that way so long as it remains a voluntary choice on the part of both.
That's exactly why religious conservatives of all people should see the beauty of political liberalism. It means we can't impose our own feminist or egalitarian notions of the good life on extreme conservatives against their will!
We can only say, with A.E. Housman: "Their deeds I judge and much condemn/ But when did I make laws for them?" (And incidentally, has anyone ever penned a better or more succinct encapsulation of the difference between comprehensive and political liberalism? I may morally judge religious conservatives under my own comprehensive ideals (so much for that supposed "relativism" with which liberals are always being charged)—but I cannot and will not legislate away their freedom to live however they will).
Here again, then, religious conservatives who persist in criticizing political liberalism—even though it leaves them perfectly free to use propaganda and persuasion to voluntarily recruit as many women as they can to their patriarchal commune—reveal that their true objection to liberalism must be that it forces them to rely on such voluntary and noncoercive means.
What they really miss about the old regime is that women and slaves and the "lower orders" didn't have a choice as to whether they got recruited into this particular S&M roleplaying scenario. They were conscripted by force.
What we're really dealing with in the "anti-liberals," then, is a bunch of men with a frustrated "will to power," who fear that not enough women will sign up for their patriarchal arch-conservative religious project unless they are forced to do so. Some women will and do doing voluntarily, as we've seen. They already do. But that's apparently not enough for the anti-liberals. They can't stand the fact that some other women choose not to sign up for doing all the dishes and childcare unassisted.
Casually, anti-liberals will often suggest—with varying degrees of politeness and evasion and indirectness—that this is just because liberalism has made women "selfish" and "hedonistic." This, if you look under the hood, is often what all that talk about "liberal individualism" and "atomization" is really getting at.
I always want to ask, though: what about the immense, extraordinary selfishness of asking other people to submit their individuality and freedom their whole lives long to your patriarchal domination?
Holmes quotes Christopher Lasch, for example, on the subject of how people in modern liberal society refuse to accept hard natural "limits," and that this—in his telling—is why the traditional family is breaking down under conditions of legal equality between the sexes.
But is it not the hardest of all limits—the most severe of all possible moral disciplines—to learn to respect and treat all other human beings as equals? Does doing so not require a constant moral vigilance, a delay of self-gratification, a self-denial of one's own worst immediate impulses toward violence or domination or aggression? (Indeed, illiberal theorists like Wyndham Lewis who objected to liberalism precisely because it was too morally demanding, not because it was too lax and permissive, were closer to the truth.)
Is it not "hedonistic" to expect one's own gender and class to have presumed authority, whereas other people have to serve one's whims?
The anti-liberal position on selfishness often seems to be: "your demand merely for legal equality with me is selfish. Whereas my expectation to be able to lord it over you—with the force of government backing me up—throughout your whole life is not selfish at all; it's simply God's and nature's way."
A husband expecting his wife to do all the childcare for him while he's in the next room with the door shut all day long writing books fulminating against feminism is not exactly my image of "selflessness." As Philip Larkin put it, in "Self's the Man": "He was out for his own ends / not just pleasing his friends." So who is to say who is truly "more selfish than I"?
We have seen, then, that what anti-liberals are really mad about is that liberalism has bestowed legal equality, freedom, and rights on groups of people who formerly had none—notably women—and that many women and others are now using that freedom to opt not to participate in their patriarchal communitarian projects.
This, inescapably, is their actual objection to liberalism. They fear they can't get enough voluntary recruits to their way of life, and liberalism deprives them of the option of using the state to enforce participation.
I'm sure many anti-liberals, particularly of the "soft" variety will get angry and this point and say "no that's not true at all, you've totally misunderstood us." And I agree that "soft" anti-liberals would not openly avow such coercive and inegalitarian ideals. What I'm saying, though, is that it's an ineluctable conclusion from their premises.
They must be objecting to the freedom of choice and legal rights that liberalism offers to women, minorities, the working class, "domestics," etc. If this were not the core of their beef, then it would surely be enough for them to voluntarily recruit people to participate in their patriarchal cosplay on any compound in rural Utah of their choosing. Political liberalism lets them do this. All we ask of them in return is not to force us to conform to their way of life against our will.
"Please yourselves, say I, and they / Need only look the other way"—to quote A.E. Housman again. "But no, they will not; they must still / Wrest their neighbour to their will, / And make me dance as they desire / With jail and gallows and hell-fire."
Of course, a "hard" anti-liberal can simply bite the bullet on this, if they dare. They can say: "yes, I do think people should be forced to conform to my theocracy against their will, because my religion teaches me that there is one correct way to live, and it is in everyone's true best interest to conform to it whether they realize that or not. Hierarchical and patriarchal ways of organizing society are correct and natural; they orient people toward the absolute good; and therefore they should be imposed regardless of anyone's personal preferences to the contrary."
Hard anti-liberals can say that. But they should not be surprised if the rest of us then resist being involuntarily conscripted into their project in this way. We will not go gently into that good compound. We have tasted liberty and legal equality and will not easily be parted from it. "I want my full freedom-right / I find the least restriction / Turns for me a paradise/ Into hell, into prison," to quote Heine.
And isn't it better than risking all-out civil war in this way to simply settle for the compromise of political liberalism, where the religious conservatives can go off and have their compounds with voluntary participation from those who wish to join them in their sub/dom roleplay, and the rest of us can mock them from afar but otherwise do nothing to stop them?
Isn't this exactly why we arrived at political liberalism in the first place—to avoid otherwise bloody and intractable religious civil wars between incompatible substantive conceptions of the good life?
Of course, the anti-liberals will retort that this "neutrality" of political liberal institutions between different worldviews is an illusion. Really, these institutions are not "neutral," because they mandate respect for the legal freedom of other people, whereas some substantive conceptions of the good life—such as those of fascists or of religious extremists—require the involuntary submission of others in order to be fulfilled. Thus, no liberal state can ever be truly neutral between ideals.
This is certainly true. This is why I didn't say that religious conservatives should settle for the compromise of political liberalism because it allows the complete fulfillment of their project—I merely said they should settle for it because human societies have tried the alternative—religious wars—and they ought to recognize by now that any liberal compromise (which still, after all, allows them to live as they individually please and to propagandize for their worldview) is better than an all-out fight to the death.
Hard anti-liberals are free to disagree with that. Fascists can say: our value system is more fully realized through martial struggle than through compromise anyway. So, the fight is on! Religious conservatives can say: what is this world compared to eternity? Better to fight and lose our mortal bodies in this world than to be thrown into the lake of fire in the next!
They are free to take this position and preach it as much as they please. I cannot stop them. They can even try to implement it through coercive action—through "jail and gallows and hell-fire". All I'm saying is that, if they do so, they should be prepared to have a fight on their hands. If they insist on civil war as the only way to settle differences between our substantive ideals, they will get their wish.
I'm tempted to say to the hard anti-liberals who want to erase our modern freedoms and legal equality, then: "From my cold, dead hands!" To quote the Iowa state motto: "Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain!"
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