America Needs Both Liberalism and Illiberalism

I n a recent piece in the New York Times, New York University historian Steven Hahn contextualizes Donald Trump’s illiberal tendencies. Trump’s illiberalism, argues Hahn, is not so un-American after all: “That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.” Hahn proceeds to document a host of illiberal episodes and strains of thought from American history, from racism to anti-Catholic bigotry. He concludes: “Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.”

Hahn fails to mention that illiberalism’s history is also human history. The tendency to form prejudices, to conceive of “us” and “them,” to govern based on power rather than reason, is not an American invention. Those impulses are baked into human nature; Herodotus was documenting them long before Hahn. And yes, in light of our humanity, Americans are not immune to illiberalism. Time and time again, we fall prey to group-based thinking, unmoor ourselves from reason, and neglect the primacy of the individual.

But what sets America apart has been our leadership in restraining the illiberalism of our human nature. If an uninformed reader were to sit down and flip through the pages of human history, he would be thunderstruck the moment he happened upon the American Revolution, the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and the ratification of the Constitution. Having slogged through chapter after chapter of endless tribal violence and jockeying for power without regard to a higher set of principles, suddenly the reader would be confronted with a new government founded on “reflection and choice,” not “accident and force.” This new government would be openly dedicated to securing the God-given rights of individuals. Politics would be organized around the individual, not the group. The individual, in turn, would be guaranteed certain fundamental freedoms, zones of liberty into which government cannot intrude.

This, in a word, is liberalism. And it very much is an American innovation. It is the same liberalism that has so often provided Americans with the means to push back against illiberalism when it rears its head here. In America, there are liberal commitments and strands of argument that we can always draw upon to combat illiberalism. So, while illiberalism’s history is human history and Americans are humans, American history also entails a striking departure — a liberal departure we ought not downplay.

In documenting American illiberalism, Hahn also omits that much of American history can be understood as figuring out how best to contain illiberalism. To contain something does not entail snuffing it out entirely. The goal is to keep illiberalism within its proper place. And surely there is a place: We’re social animals who need and desire group-based attachments. We need illiberalism. While one side of the tribal urge to distinguish “us” from “them” can be vile prejudice, the flip side is in-group love and affection. Even in a political order dedicated to liberalism, our commitments to our families, friends, and local communities need space to flourish. Giving healthy illiberal commitments room to breathe thus requires containing liberalism itself — to prevent baseline, fundamental commitments from becoming all-encompassing worldviews that admit of no local variation and wipe out illiberal enclaves. The dual containment of liberalism and illiberalism can best be described as pluralism: honoring certain limited universal principles that make adequate space for our illiberal human nature to flourish.

The history of American federalism and localism is best viewed as a concession to the need for contained illiberalism and liberalism alike — i.e., pluralism. Even as they constructed a liberal constitutional order, in setting up state-based representation in the United States Senate and constraining the powers of the federal government, the Framers gave due regard to Americans’ attachments to their in-groups, their respective states. An otherwise liberal constitutional order that did not give voice to those group-based attachments and give them room to flourish would not persist. To be sure, only certain illiberal lines of thinking were given breathing space: attachments to local communities and place were honored in the form of federalism; attachments to hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy were wiped out in the form of the prohibition on titles of nobility, and eventually, the most vicious form of irrational hierarchy — slavery — was eliminated.

It is time that we get back in the habit of containment. Part of what ails our politics today is our lost ability to properly contain illiberalism and liberalism alike.

Even as they are beset by group-based, oppressor–oppressed modes of thinking, progressives are failing to contain liberalism. They increasingly demand conformity to and national enforcement of contested and contestable worldviews that prioritize the individual’s ability to define oneself over all else, no matter what nature itself and tradition have to say. Meanwhile, the political right is increasingly failing to contain illiberalism. Populists are increasingly bringing us-versus-them modes of thinking to bear on national domestic politics and downplaying the inviolability of constitutional constraints.

The path forward must center on rediscovering pluralism — rediscovering our capacity to find the right mix of liberalism and illiberalism. In the past, against a centuries-long backdrop of illiberalism, America was exceptional in its explicit support of liberalism. Today, as we confront dominant strains of liberalism and illiberalism, America must prove exceptional yet again by self-consciously and explicitly staking out core liberal commitments while allowing illiberalism the space that it is due.