The Age of Illiberalism

If it were possible to reconvene in the Independence Hall of heaven, I think it is fair to say that America’s Founding Fathers, peering down upon this moment in America—especially our political culture—might gallingly thunder, “This is not at all what we had in mind! What’s wrong with you people? Where is your independence . . . remember, the one we declared with that piece of parchment on behalf of the Thirteen Colonies, and all future Americans? We went to war over this, for God’s sake!”

The ghosts of those wigged, pointy-toed revolutionaries would be right. We deserve to be haunted by them and ashamed of ourselves. I don’t know about you, but failing our Founders is not how I would like to be remembered.

Independence for them didn’t just mean separation from the British Crown. It also included the freedom to exercise a set of newly defined liberties, and adopt liberal values, that had only recently emanated from the European Enlightenment. 

The Enlightenment was more instrumental in our founding than any other single event. It was the operating system for liberal democracy, and it provided the foundation for our own democratic self-governance. 

We were not alone. It spread to many Western nations that took on their own democratic character. Each had an Enlightened philosopher as north star: England with John Locke, Scotland with David Hume, Germany with Immanuel Kant, France with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the United States had Thomas Jefferson, among others in those and other Western countries.

This late 18^th century phenomenon became known as the Age of Reason, and Classical Liberalism became its political calling card. The people entered into a social contract with their government and consented to be governed.

No longer were rights granted through the good graces of monarchs. Citizens possessed natural rights—rights that inhered in nature itself. The will of the people determined their destiny, not the narcissism of kings. In addition to free speech, open discourse, civil debate and dialogue, and meritocracy, a free press –untainted by bias or favor—was necessary to the political process. Taken together these values made self-government and representative democracy possible. 

Independence of mind, freedom of thought, and rational decision-making was the essence of the new democratic order. And no nation did more with the fruits of the Enlightenment than these United States. We are the world’s oldest functioning democracy. Democracy is in our national DNA; the self-identification of an American begins with our democratic character. It was our big bang. And let us not forget that we fought for these liberties. They came at a cost. Ragtag colonialists took on the most fearsome military power in the world, and won. Such a victory should never be squandered, or its cause forgotten.

There are profound sensitivities surrounding American democracy. When anti-Trump voters invoke his return to the White House as the “end of democracy,” they know exactly how visceral such a charge lingers in an American’s mind. It presses all of our most patriotic buttons. 

To be an American means to be liberal: open to ideas, discerning of dogma, measured when faced with divergent views, insistent on the rule of law, and able to make fundamental distinctions between right and wrong. 

Republicans have always represented themselves as conservative in their outlook and politics. That doesn’t mean, however, that liberalism does not guide their thinking and inform their purpose. Democrats have always maintained that liberal politics in America was their milieu and mandate, with liberalism serving as the wellspring of their political culture.

As of late, however, I fear that the Democratic Party doth protest too much. Honestly, does the Biden administration in any way resemble a government committed to liberalism, in lockstep with the Enlightenment, in the good graces with America’s Founders? 

Here is the list of particulars that would suggest otherwise. Broken borders and rampant crime. Indoctrination and censorship. Equity over equality. The wholesale indictment of American history and an appalling lack of patriotism, exemplified by a pernicious national self-loathing, and blaming all the world’s problems on 250 years of America’s racist aspirations and its false democracy. 

What has been happening on the campuses of American universities over this past year is emblematic of the current Democratic Party’s organizing principles: the hysterical and unhinged charges of racism and colonialism, genocide and apartheid; the moral acceptance of terrorists; the self-righteous social activism that allows no room for disagreement and debate; the threatened boycotts and violent protests; the lawlessness and intimidation; and the casualness about anti-Semitism and the betrayal of our democratic ally, Israel. 

That’s what’s happening outside on the campus green. Inside its classrooms students are being indoctrinated—even in the hard sciences—with Critical Race and Queer theories, Decolonialization, and the renaming of Marxist marching orders as, “Intifada Revolution!”

What, specifically, is liberal about any of those lovely features of contemporary politics and culture? Forget the Founding Fathers, what we have today isn’t even your own father’s United States. 

The Democratic Party has eschewed liberalism for progressivism, engineering a quite clever bait and switch—advancing a progressive agenda having far more in common with Marxism than with anything an actual liberal believes. For instance, the “Politics of Identity,” a rallying cry of the progressive left, has little in common with liberal ideals. In fact, so much of it is avowedly illiberal. 

Liberals are interested in ideas that can be exchanged in a deliberate manner and respectful setting. But identity politics shuts off debate at the outset by claiming instantaneous offense. There is never anything to debate. Marginalized affinity groups are automatic winners in a sweepstakes of ideological conformity. Objectors are libeled as irredeemable racists. The consequence of nuance, the risk of holding a different view, can be disastrous: the denial of tenure, the termination of employment, the shunning of friends, the disowning of relatives, the cancelation of a once good name.

There is nothing “liberal” in any of those features of progressive politics. The hard-left fringe within the Democratic Party went from silent partner to full-blown Soviet- and Chairman Mao-styled autocracy. 

The Democratic Party somehow disappeared. Does anyone even recognize a semblance of its former self? 

Our old American mottos have become anachronistic and irreconcilable. They in no way symbolize our feckless foreign affairs and localized lawlessness. “Don’t tread on me.” Seriously? That warning has been converted into an invitation: “Please, walk all over us. Don’t worry. We’ll blame ourselves. Better yet, we’ll blame Israel, or our own Jews.” The Iranians don’t even bother to wipe their feet on Persian rugs after stepping all over us.

What about our state mottos: Alabama, “We Dare to Defend Our Rights”; Arkansas, “The People Rule”; Mississippi, “By Valor and Arms”; New Hampshire, “Live Free or Die.”

Sounds like the tough talk of some other country. The reason these rallying cries no longer represent our national ethos is because after being berated for our “white supremacy” and “systemic racism,” the concept of American Exceptionalism was renounced as both racist and a sham. America is no more exceptional than any other nation, so goes this more modern mantra. Really? All nations are exceptional? This is the same kind of moral relativism that has infected our universities. And it depends on a gullible audience that has lost its deductive reasoning and capacity to make moral judgments.

The idea of America’s specialness on the world stage began in 1630 with the words of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He referred to this new world as a “shiny city on a hill, … a beacon of liberty.” Others, including Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, have referred to that imagery in describing the nation they led. 

Does it hold true today? That sanctified city, shining like a beacon on a hill, nowadays has a broken taillight and for all practical purposes, has fallen into a ditch.

The Founding Fathers launched a new nation, and after nearly a dozen years of getting these United States in order, graduating from the Continental Congress to the Constitutional Convention, and after endless debates and the commentary that became Federalist Papers, they were quite certain that what they had achieved was quite exceptional.

Tell that to the Democratic Party, which takes exception to American greatness, and believes it is patriotic to imprison January 6^th rioters but not the violent actions undertaken by hoodlums affiliated with Black Lives Matter and Jewish Lives Don’t. Calls to defund the police and mothball the National Guard, cashless bail and the decriminalizing of crimes, the defacement of public monuments, the toppling of statues, flag burnings, and erasing the names of such notorious racists as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln from school buildings across America—all of this, under the auspices and blessing of Democratic leadership. 

Meanwhile, Jesus Christ and George Floyd are depicted draped in the Palestinian flag with a keffiyeh covering their faces. You don’t have to live in Dearborn, Michigan, to know that the chants “Death to America!” has little to do Israel’s War in Gaza. These people have been in rehearsal for years, and they have a much bigger target in mind.

This intersectional rot of illiberal, anti-American, anti-democratic forces that has come to possess an inordinate amount of influence over the Democratic Party, along with mainstream media, museums, academia, and the cultural arts, is antithetical to America’s historical beginning. The Founding Fathers were patriots, after all. July 4^th was not an excuse for a cookout. They saw the United States as a land of opportunity, and not as a punching bag for the disgruntled. They imagined a melting pot for the newly assimilated, and not as a country fixated on ranking racists and deploring privilege.

These men of the Enlightenment behaved like the enlightened. They started and funded universities and newspapers: Benjamin Franklin (the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Gazette); Thomas Jefferson (the University of Virginia and the National Gazette); Alexander Hamilton (the New York Post.) Higher education expanded minds; college is not where students learn how to close them. They believed in the Great Books. The fact that some of the ancient Greek philosophers may have been gay did not mean they were endorsing Queer Studies. What made a book great had nothing to do with how and whether the writer chose to represent his or her identity.  

The Founders believed in civility and mutual respect. Differences could be settled without resort to violence. They judged people based on individual merit. Decisions were to be made deliberately, not impulsively, relying upon empirical evidence and not “personal truths” and sensitive feelings. Withholding judgment was a virtue. Shouting people down is not.

Very few of those values are in evidence these days. Given the way things are shaping up for this upcoming presidential election, it will be a miracle if we can manage to elude another civil war.

It is remarkable how far we have fallen from the august talent that drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence. The recent national conventions were mere coronations. Kamala Harris didn’t even receive the vote of a single delegate. The speeches couldn’t possibly be less inspiring. Donald Trump’s endless ad-libbing and pointless jabbing. Harris’ inane non-responsiveness to questions and clumsy dodging of issues. 

Oratory is one thing these candidates do not offer on the stump. Every four years, this is supposed to be the season of political persuasion. What we have instead is one candidate who would be far better off speaking less, and another who has been coached to plead the Fifth Amendment on the campaign trail and avoid saying the predictably wrong thing. You need not return to the days of Patrick Henry and Daniel Webster, or Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, to realize that even politicians of more recent eras offered more at the podium. 

The debates have been even more excruciating. Watch the first televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 and behold the deterioration of today’s presidential timbre. Candidates once read more widely, and did not confine themselves to opposition research. They immersed themselves in domestic policy and geopolitics. They actually debated ideas, and didn’t regurgitate canned answers that pivoted away from the original question.

The Founding Fathers regarded freedom of the press as indispensable to representative democracy. A better-informed public needs journalists to serve as unbiased truth-seekers and fact-checkers. And yet, now we hear speculation that the moderators for the debate at ABC News allegedly gave Kamala Harris advance notice of their questions, and promised not to challenge her facts?

This is how dysfunctional our democracy has become. Even if untrue, the allegation itself will only serve to deepen our polarizing divide.

But regardless of how one feels about the viability of the two-party system and the inadequacy of the choices we are presented with, one thing is surely true: the progressive takeover of the Democratic Party has rendered it inhospitable to true liberals and open-minded centrists. 

This is no longer the party of the Kennedy brothers, Scoop Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Joe Lieberman—political figures who epitomized the liberal values of deep thought and a democratic consensus. What we now have is the Democratic Party that Barack Obama wanted to lead—the president progressives believed they had elected back in 2008—but his timing was off. Who knows how much his influence found its way into the policies of the Biden administration.

The party of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is something else altogether. It personifies the Marxism of the faculty lounge, the smugness of social justice warriors, the grievances of the growing number of victim-cardholders, the obtuseness of coastal elites, the hostility of the Arab street, and the double-standard entrenched in diversity and inclusion. 

Sounds like a party where invitations got lost in the mail, and true liberals rejoiced.