What Accounts for Liberalism’s Unpopularity?
Sheltering in Place Has Warped Our Relationship to Violence
Every day I see another article in a mainstream publication questioning, if not bashing, liberalism (the social contract theory developed by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau). I find myself wondering, “Why now?” Where were these articles and writers five years ago? Why has it become fashionable in 2021 to criticize liberalism from both the left and the right?
You might disagree with my premise. People have always found problems with liberalism. Nothing is new here. Perhaps, intellectually speaking, you’d be right. But culturally, to me, it seems that signaling one’s distaste for liberalism has become more mainstream and less “radical” or “edgy.” Of course, Marxists on the left and traditionalist communitarians on the right were never liberal. The one sees liberalism as a tool of exploitation and bourgeois passivity while the other sees it as an instrument for the destruction of the family. Yet outside certain pockets of academia and institutional religion, liberalism had widespread support.
If you accept my narrative claim that something new is in the air, how do you explain the phenomenon? One dissatisfying possibility is simply that social media gives fuel to minority opinions, allowing them to find their followers, and gain distribution where previously they could not. This, in turn, puts pressure on institutional gatekeepers to legitimate the intellectual pirates and let them in—at the idealistic level, because of the value of “inclusion” and at the business level, because of the value of “eyeballs.” According to Nassim Taleb, a loud and passionate minority (just 3% of a population) can gain outsized influence in a society if everybody else is simply complacent, polite, and indifferent. Perhaps the story is just technological—social media has allowed lone wolves to congregate on the internet and find their “tribe.”
Another possibility is that the usual defenders of liberalism have lost their conviction, leaving a vacuum for its critics.
And of course, the most plausible explanation is that some political or sociological trends are responsible for the weakening of liberalism. Whether you think the issue is polarization, generally, or an intensification of of activist culture (which, by definition, repudiates discourse and debate) or something else, the point is that the cultural change is the result of some external event or series of events.
My speculative, but by no means exclusive hypothesis, is that Covid-induced social distancing caused people to spend more time away from one another, which reduced a sense of skin in the game. When people are bored and angry and don’t have to look their fellow neighbors (and dissidents) in the face, they forget the importance of co-existence. Whatever you think of the negatives of liberalism, the obvious benefit is that it allows people to live together even when they vehemently disagree. Liberalism is the sublimation of religious war. Online, people forget this. And so they can gesture at a desire for violence without having to pay the price. They write viciously, as if the keyboard were mightier than the sword, without actually suffering anything more than indignity. A lot of criticism of liberalism is just virtue signaling. If people spent more times in bars, where words could lead to fights, perhaps we’d be less belligerent. But all the staying at home has got people wound up looking to fight.
Ironically, even in-person fighting would be a form of socialization preferable to the pain of looking at 20 tiny boxes on a zoom call.
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