Illiberal Principles

Illiberals aren't hypocrites or unprincipled. They're just not liberals.

One of the more delicious culture war stories in the news right now concerns the leadership of elite universities being raked over the coals for their policies towards overtly antisemitic speech on campus. Many lefty student protesters have been stridently anti-Israel in light of the ongoing war in Gaza, and the rhetoric that gets used by these protesters has had a tendency to cross the line into some pretty ugly anti-Jewish bigotry. University administrators have been expected to condemn this bigotry with the same immediacy and passion with which they have condemned other forms of bigotry on campus. That they have been generally unwilling to do so has been the source of much controversy. The words “hypocrisy” and “double standards” have been flying around a lot.

In general, it’s easy to find a certain attitude among small-l liberals, the kinds of people who value free speech and open inquiry, that goes something like this:

These leftist types have been only too happy to call for the censorship of conservative or even moderate views in recent years. But now, with intense scrutiny of anti-Israel rhetoric on campus, these same leftists are being censored for their speech. Of course they hate this. But fuck em, right? Sure, we’ll stand up for their free speech rights, but it’s a little delicious that they’re demanding free speech rights that they would so callously deny to others. The hypocrites. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, perhaps they will see that they were wrong all along, and we were right. I mean, I wouldn’t count on it. But if they had any intellectual honesty, this is the lesson they would be drawing.

Now, I’m the kind of small-l liberal that values free speech and open inquiry, but I’m not tempted to say anything like this, because it’s a profoundly ignorant thing to say. It demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what motivates illiberals on the left and the right. Yes, the left is howling about the fact that their speech on Israel is being censored. But they’re not hypocrites. They’re perfectly consistent in how they act. They’re just not acting from liberal principles.

By a “liberal principle,” I mean a principle that endeavors to remain neutral between two sides in some contested first-order political debate. The value of free speech is a liberal principle. If there is some controversial political issue, a liberal free speech principle says that both sides to this debate should be equally free to make the case for their side in the debate. While a liberal might be strongly in favor of one side or the other, they refuse to censor the other side even if that is in their power. “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” is the liberal rallying cry. Jewish lawyers who defended the right of Nazis to march in a Jewish community is the paradigm of a liberal defense of free expression.

What is essential to liberalism is a refusal, as far as is possible, to distinguish between good things and bad things. Illiberals, on the other hand, are very eager to distinguish between good things and bad things. Liberals want everyone to be able to speak. Illiberals want good speech to happen but don’t want bad speech to happen. “If I disagree with what you say (because it’s fucking evil), I won’t defend your right to say it. And why would I? It’s fucking evil. I don’t defend evil things. Who in their right mind would?” That’s the illiberal rallying cry.

So when leftists are howling at being censored, it’s not because they’ve somehow backed themselves into discovering the value of free speech although they’re loath to admit it. Speech for good things is good, and censoring good speech is bad. Speech for bad things is bad, and censoring bad speech is good. Their speech is good, so it’s bad that it’s being censored. Not because censorship as such is bad, but because censorship of good views is bad. Censorship of bad views is great, but their views aren’t bad, so that doesn’t apply to censorship of their views. Those are illiberal principles, and illiberals are being absolutely 100% consistent in affirming and applying those principles. They’re not hypocrites. They just have a completely different framework for thinking about speech and censorship than liberals do.

I know some liberals will be tempted to reply at this point by saying “Speech that is good according to who? Bad according to who?” But the illiberal answer will typically be “Good and bad according to people who can tell the difference between good things and bad things.” And that’s a perfectly acceptable answer. I mean, I wouldn’t accept that answer, because I’m a moral skeptic and an error theorist, so I don’t think that there’s any real difference between good things and bad things and I don’t think that anyone could know of any difference between good things and bad things. But I think it’s a mistake to try to defend liberalism by appeal to moral anti-realism. Anti-realism is a controversial metaethical view, and it becomes more controversial when we’re engaged in first-order moral disagreements. “The ACLU was right to defend the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie because there’s nothing really bad about being a Nazi” won’t win many converts to the cause, even if that’s a logically sound argument.

Perhaps I’ll spell out what I take to be the best case for liberalism in more detail in another post. For now, my point is just that illiberals aren’t liberals, and that illiberalism is motivated primarily by a desire to draw distinctions between good things and bad things. Illiberals are only unprincipled and hypocritical if you are so dedicated to liberalism that you can only think of being principled and consistent from a liberal perspective. Illiberals are principled and consistent from their own perspective. Illiberals do have double standards, but of course they do. They have one standard for things that are good, and another for things that are bad. Don’t you? No? Well why the fuck not?

If you don’t understand that as a liberal, you don’t understand your intellectual opponents.