What happened to Democrats who are liberals?

In a column some weeks ago, Bret Stephens argued that “America needs a Liberal Party that represents what we used to be and what we desperately need to become again.” Currently, he writes, the most “basic division in politics isn’t between liberals and conservatives, as the terms used to be understood. It’s between liberals and illiberals.”

By “liberalism,” he’s referring to “the tenets and spirit of liberal democracy,” which, he says, “used to be the more-or-less common ground of American politics, inhabited by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes as much as by Barack Obama and the two Clintons.” These include things like respect for the outcome of elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the principle, legally and otherwise, of innocent until proven guilty.

Other aspects are a sensibly regulated free market system, complemented by a social support safety net; deference to personal autonomy but skepticism of identity politics; a commitment to equality of opportunity, not equity in outcomes; faith in the benefits of immigration, free trade, new technology, new ideas, experiments in living; and fidelity to the ideals of the free world in the face of dictators and demagogues.

“The debates,” Stephens elaborates, “that used to divide the parties — the proper scope of government, the mechanics of trade — amounted to parochial quarrels within a shared liberal faith. That faith steadied America in the face of domestic and global challenges from the far right and far left alike.”

Stephens’ use of “liberal” not as a substitute epithet for “G-d-less degenerate” but as an antonym for “illiberal” may be mystifying to those of our community’s young people whose meager political knowledge comes not from their nonexistent Civics classes but from a media where sports pages are treif, but politics-as-sports sections are kosher l’mehadrin. No, we shouldn’t feature sports pages in our publications — but maybe we should consider banishing their functional equivalent of the political analysis variety. Both have the same effect of immersing readers in the non-Jewish zeitgeist, and the latter has the added detriment of stirring animus for fellow members of society with animus.

He regards the illiberalism of the right as the more dangerous form today, “because it has shown that it is capable of winning elections and, when it loses, subverting them,” but he’s not at all sanguine about the illiberalism of the left. He writes that anyone “on the left who hasn’t noticed the climate of fear that now grips liberal institutions needs to start paying closer attention.”

He concludes that the “new illiberalism is frightening,” but “could also be productive. Everyone who has been bitten by it, left or right, is rediscovering how capacious the old liberal faith was, how trivial its internal differences really were, how much they might yet have in common — including common enemies — with people they once regarded as ideological opposites.” Although he sees in this “the seeds of a party,” a potential right-left realignment to counter a shared threat, the political realities make that highly unlikely.

But the good news is that what Bret Stephens hopes for in the governmental context is already under way in other forms elsewhere in American society. There’s been a veritable flowering of groups forming, each representing an ideological cross section of individuals united by their deep concern over the new illiberalism and intent on fighting to preserve a free American society.

An early expression of this effort was a journal called Persuasion, founded last July by prominent academic Yascha Mounk. With a board of advisors featuring first-rank intellectuals spanning the political spectrum, it quickly attracted a community of thousands of like-minded people. It has featured countless powerful pieces and sponsored events defending free speech and free inquiry and detailing the experiences of victims of corporate and academic censorship. Persuasion was followed by another new journal, American Purpose, with a mission of “defense of classical liberalism. Responsibility. Push back against illiberal extremes. A broad, dynamic, pluralistic space.”

But this counteroffensive extends far beyond new publications to the founding of organizations that are helping real people. In March, the Academic Freedom Alliance was launched by a national coalition of liberals, conservatives, and libertarian academics to provide a moral and legal defense of professors whose free speech or scholarly independence is threatened. Princeton politics professor Keith Whittington explained that “all of the organization’s members commit to defending speech rights regardless of whether we agree with the speech under attack.”

That same month, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) was founded to promote a liberal, pluralistic vision of anti-racism while encouraging parents and other citizens to push back against the intolerant and divisive varieties. Co-founder Bion Bartning, an entrepreneur new to activism, says “there are just a lot of parents who are seeing this race-essentialist approach and have the same concerns that I have….”

When British scholar Helen Pluckrose coauthored a book about campus illiberalism, she began receiving hundreds of emails daily from workers – like the firefighter who was threatened with discipline for saying he “would serve everyone regardless of race, creed or color.” So she founded Counterweight, an organization dedicated to supporting employees who push back against ideological coercion or intimidation in the workplace. The Free Speech Union, which launched in Britain last year, is now opening a US affiliate and plans to have biweekly coordinating calls among all these various groups.

Assessing the prospects for success of this nascent counteroffensive, the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch writes: “How much will all this activity matter? Possibly a lot. Networked activism can have game-changing political impact, sometimes in months, not decades…. Spirals of silence can persist for years, even decades. But they can collapse fast once dissenters begin to see and support each other…. Today’s burst of countermobilization suggests that the Spanish Inquisition phase is ending and that pluralists are finding their collective voice.”

There’s no more bandied-about term in America today than “cancel culture.” Talk of it is ubiquitous, but nowhere more so than among the politics-as-sports crowd, those who don’t know the difference between “liberalism” and “liberal democracy.”

But it’s important to know that the phenomenon exists in mirror image on the right and left. The left-wing variety exists in corporations, media, and academia; the right-wing version exists in media, religious movements, and politics. I have compassion for the liberal professor who has a progressive posse out to get him fired for teaching an un-woke version of American history, and even deeper concern for my country when congressmen reported how some of their Republican colleagues told them they were afraid for their lives if they voted for impeachment.

Yet the bottom line is that the entire concept has become an empty caricature of itself. Whatever the merits of Georgia’s new Republican-sponsored voting law (which is neither as draconian nor as innocuous as either side would have it), when a Georgia-based corporation issues a carefully worded statement disapproving of the law, that’s cancellation; when Republican politicians urge boycotts of the company and vote to strip it of tax breaks, that’s not. Shouting “cancel culture” is now just another culture-war meme that cynical politicians like Georgia governor Kemp — himself a recent victim of Republican cancel culture — use to raise huge sums of cash from unwitting saps.

Last summer, an open letter signed by over 150 of the biggest names in arts and letters, including many left and left-of-center authors and intellectuals, denounced the rise of cancel culture on the left, condemning “disproportionate punishments” meted out to targets of public shaming by institutional leaders conducting “panicked damage control… The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” suggested the letter. “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters… But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought… We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement…”

At the time, I asked whether an equally distinguished group on the right will speak out against what’s happening on their side of the fence, and the question still begs.  —

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 856. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com