My 2024 book How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration is about an unfortunate outcome in Western political life. Why and how did we end up with intolerant ideologies on both sides of Western politics? This is particularly apparent in the Anglosphere, but all of the liberal democracies of Europe - France, Spain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, etc. - have been affected.Right-wing people like to characterize themselves as protecting individual freedoms, especially freedom of speech, but of course that's not true historically or even now. They just identify different forms of speech and expression that they want to censor, and more generally have different restrictions on freedom that they want to impose.
But the interesting story is how the political Left over the past 50 years turned away from liberalism as it was traditionally understood - as being primarily about liberty, with the logical corollary of also being about tolerating many ideas, practices, ways of life, etc., that we don't necessarily agree with or like.
Instead, the political Left and a large component of the knowledge class came to embrace an ideology entirely about defending, or even sanctifying, groups that are seen as oppressed. Other groups are then viewed primarily as privileged and oppressive, not matter how far this distorts the reality, and especially the reality faced by individuals who may have experienced personal hardships in their lives while belonging to a supposedly privileged demographic.
This ideology can then override any and all other values, including individual liberty, freedom of speech, and the rule of law - but also any other values that people might hold, such as various aesthetic values. Thus, the result is a totalizing ideology that's fundamentally illiberal and more like a religion than like traditional liberal thought.
As I trace historically in How We Became Post-Liberal, we can see hints of this starting to happen even in the late 1960s, but it becomes the main trend around 1975, with a further intensification more recently. This begins with an inflection point that we can narrow down to about 2010 (it then becomes more visible to the general public by, say, 2015). There's no single cause as to why this trajectory happened, but we can identify specific influences and perhaps some deep aspects of human nature that facilitated it. That's what How We Became Post-Liberal is about.
Part of the problem was a perceived failure of traditional liberalism to produce social change at the speed demanded by some identity groups - though whether positive change could have happened more quickly in the face of strong opposition is at least doubtful.
I don't have any straightforward solution to this outcome. Ironically, I think it harms left-leaning political parties because they've become associated with an ideology that many everyday, non-political people fear and reject, though they might see some attraction in traditional liberal ideas that are now embraced by no major political party (at least in the Anglosphere). As a reaction, we see some people being attracted to right-wing populists who at least give lip service to traditional freedoms even if they show their own kinds of intolerance.
The best we can do for the moment is continue to affirm traditional liberal ideas and put them out there in the sphere of public discussion as an alternative to the dominant illiberal ideologies of Left and Right. The other thing we can do is just show how this happened through a series of contingent historical events: it didn't have to be this way where we're stuck with a choice of rival illiberalisms. We can reject the illiberal ideologies of both sides and look for alternatives. Our own analyses of important issues and events needn't be grounded in either form of illiberal thought.
Just knowing that fact can be liberating and potentially empowering, and getting as many people as possible to understand what has happened (and why) could help in our current situation. But I can't say it's a thought that I'm having a lot of success in spreading widely to the public.
How We Became Post-Liberal does provide a detailed analysis of ideas of liberalism and toleration, how they emerged as a powerful tradition in European modernity, and what we know about why they collapsed over the past half-century. Not many people seem to have a grasp of this problem, especially in the detail that How We Became Post-Liberal provides, so I'll continue to promote the book - not in the hope of raking in any large royalties but because I think it presents an important thesis that has not been developed with such rigor anywhere else.
