Yes, our tribalist hysteria sucks. But don't count liberalism out just yet.
Andrew Sullivan
Nov 01, 2024
Is this our first post-liberal election?
Maybe I should unpack that question a bit more. By liberal, I don’t mean left-wing — or right-wing for that matter. I mean a system in which we are committed to living peacefully with others who differ from us, sometimes profoundly. I mean abiding by the same democratic rules to reach compromises, a system where we win some and lose some, and each election season, we lick our wounds or stroke our whiskers, and prepare for the next contest. I mean, in a word, pluralism. This is the essence of liberal democracy; we are Lockean advocates and opponents of various causes and politicians; we are not Schmittian friends and enemies. And no issue is ever settled for good.
This vision of politics held firm for much of my lifetime, even as Western democracies went through convulsions. It’s deeply underrated. It got us through the 1960s tumult, the Cold War, the Islamist terror wave, and the first wave of “political correctness.” But as the economy inexorably and relentlessly split the country in two new classes (the college educated and not), and as ever-more experiments in living emerged to compete with the old, liberal democracy began to fray, as the ancient philosophers predicted. A surplus of elites and a boredom bred of nihilism made things worse.
From the 1990s onward, the Gingrich Republicans increasingly refused to accept the legitimacy of Democratic presidents, and then, under Trump, refused to accept the legitimacy of the elections themselves. The intellectual right flirted first with ridding the world of tyranny alongside with fundamentalist certainty; in the wake of that catastrophe, they went more recently with Thomist “integralism” and caudillo-style populism. Live-and-let-live ethics ceded to Christianism and then Christian Nationalism, and even a half-assed insurrection to overthrow an election.
And among Democrats, a new puritanical zeal emerged to stamp out the original American sin of slavery through an “anti-racist” Kulturkampf — by re-educating children and indoctrinating adults in a new era of “social justice.” In this new woke world, toleration was another word for oppression, and silence equaled violence. The universities became madrassas, the newspapers turned into tracts — abandoning reporting for narratives based in the idea of America as a permanent White supremacy. Dissenters were ostracized or fired. No neutral zone was allowed; and no private space was permitted to exclude the public orthodoxy.
Trump of course catalyzed both illiberalisms, and made them more suffocating. He holds the truth and the rule of law in contempt when applied to him — and that corrosion spread. He abides no principle but obedience to him and to his ego. He has made the right more radical and turned the left into a manic, emotionally incontinent mess. Biden’s promise in 2020 to be a calmer and unifier evaporated almost immediately, as soon as he entered office, as he embraced industrial policy and massive spending, and replaced equality with equity, color-blindness with “anti-racism”, and sex with gender.
The calm, the skepticism, the toleration, the epistemic humility, and the moderation that make a liberal democracy possible seemed to vanish into thin air.
Critically, the oldest and greatest cultural bulwark of liberalism — Christianity — also collapsed. The deep belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God and all equally flawed and forgivable gave way to a fundamentalist hubris on the right that saw liberals not as citizens who were misguided but as enemies who had to be destroyed. And on the left, Trump supporters soon became viewed as alien, anathema, unfathomable, deplorable — bigots for whom forgiveness was unthinkable.
That’s why we’re so on edge right now. For the two tribes, this has come to seem existential. If Harris wins, the right fears ever-more cultural onslaught, persecution, lawfare, and media gaslighting. If Trump wins, the left fears an end to the rule of law and the birth of a fascist regime — complete with camps, tanks, and an unquestionable leader. It feels less like an election than the eve of a final battle.
But is it? As someone who has seen our polity through this lens for some time, I’m now asking myself if I may have overstated the case. We will find out in the next few days and weeks if our worst fears materialize of a liberal democracy come undone. But here are some brief, unusually optimistic, thoughts ahead of the abyss in front of us.
Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is at the time. Yes, our discourse is horrid and made worse by social media. Yes, in the abstract, we have come to hate and fear one another. But in practice, in real life, I haven’t witnessed social collapse. Yes, things get a bit edgy. Yes, it’s hard to be a moderate in an evangelical church, or a liberal in a leftist corporation. But this is not 1968, as we saw this August in Chicago. American easy-going pragmatism still endures in both red and blue America. We feared American fascism in 2016. It didn’t arrive. The system survived one Trump term. It may well another.
Our 50-50 divide also helps in a way: it makes the red-blue gulf nerve-wracking — but it also effectively bars a huge victory for either side any time soon. We are more likely to continue gridlocked than descend into a civil war. Compared with any other developed nation, we’re also booming economically, despite our mutual loathing, innovating away, and still a cultural global hub. We’re not Weimar Germany — a new democracy wracked by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, and wounded national pride. We are the oldest democracy in the world.
Federalism and the First Amendment are also the safety valves bequeathed us by our Founders. Some questions — like abortion — really are hard to compromise on, but forcing one side’s settlement on everyone (Roe) is the illiberal move. So in some ways, Dobbs has actually made liberalism easier, not harder. It allows for different legal regimes — and experience of them.
The First Amendment has also saved us from the illiberalism of the woke left. Just think of what has happened to free speech in Canada and Britain without it. Yes, the woke captured every institution, but they failed to censor online media (thanks, Elon!), and could not prevent the rise of an alternative media universe to push back against orthodoxy. For every NPR bore, there arrived a Rogan; for every WaPo narrative, a singular Substack voice; for every red guard “fact-checker” in legacy media, there’s a “community notes”.
