Scott Sumner offers an argument that liberalism can be a vaccine against authoritarianism. I’m inclined to believe that committed liberals can’t be authoritarian because authoritarianism is illiberal. It’s not so much that liberalism is a vaccine as it is definitionally true that someone who endorses wholesale illiberalism forfeits the liberal label in the process.
That’s a quibble, though. Sumner’s exploration of what makes liberalism robust to the appeal of authoritarianism is worthwhile.
Sumner uses Nazis and Maoists, defined narrowly, to illustrate. Sumner is talking not only about early-20th-century German Nazis and mid-20th-century Maoists in China, but those movements as we think of them now, knowing the worst of what they did. In this sense, not everyone who voted for the NSDAP in 1932 or 1933 was a Nazi in the way he means it.
Sumner argues that a strong commitment to one’s principles and the cause of freedom would have precluded support for either of these extreme parties.
“Freedom” as a standard isn’t enough, though. Almost everyone—even many non-liberals—will profess a commitment to freedom and believe some constraints follow from that concept. Liberal freedom does not include the freedom to steal what you want, and we think that’s fine because we’re liberals. We see this defence of individuals against one another as valid.
Collective versions of freedom are concerned with defending the favoured group against potential disruption by individuals. This conception of freedom is also concerned with protection from outside intervention and criticism—the collective’s ability to suppress the individual needs to be protected. Anne Applebaum points out that this is what modern-day China means by “sovereignty” and what Russia advocates for when it demands international “multipolarity.”
Nor are liberals immune from endorsing what is not yet but will turn out to be authoritarianism. Liberals have never endorsed Nazism or Maoism as we think of them now, defined by the worst things they led to. But some liberals made excuses for Hitler and Mao in their time, and I suspect plenty of liberals voted for the NSDAP. At least some liberals trusted or hoped that Hitler would not do the worst things he had ever advocated while hoping he would put a stop to communism. Good people make mistakes, even truly terrible mistakes.
There is a debate within liberalism about which freedoms matter. Here, the narrowness of Sumner’s examples of authoritarianism might obscure more than it helps. Liberals don’t entertain support for slavery and can write out of the project anyone who does. It is less obvious to classical liberals whether we can automatically write out of liberalism those who opposed or neglected the extension of political rights, for example, to women in the Gilded Age or Black Americans in the Civil Rights era. It is less obvious to welfare liberals that we can write out of liberalism New Deal Democrats whose regard for economic freedom was so low.
To the extent that some liberals have been willing to disregard or set aside some rights for individuals because of the groups they inhabit, those liberals have found it easier to see common cause with non-liberals who are nonetheless concerned about, for example, property rights over political rights (among classical liberals) or political rights over property rights (among welfare liberals).
This shouldn’t be seen as a call for greater purity when classifying liberals. It’s not that every liberal who didn’t stubbornly demand trans rights in the 1990s would have gone along with Hitler. It just recognizes that liberals are not immune when it comes to taking a turn toward authoritarianism.
Liberalism is not just freedom. The rhetoric of freedom and institutions that protect the freedom of only some people cannot inoculate us. Liberalism aspires to inclusive freedom and institutions that protect everyone. Liberalism’s universalism, not only its emphasis on freedom, is needed when looking for an effective predictor of someone’s ability to resist authoritarianism.
