How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

A second flank was opened up against liberalism on the grounds of ethnicity. If standpoint theory was true, then liberalism’s claims of universality were no more than a form of ethnocentrism – the evaluation of one culture according to the assumptions of another. Liberalism claimed to project norms that could apply to all humanity, but were in fact culturally specific to the West. In this view, imperialism was not just something that happened to coincide with the advent of liberalism in the late 17th Century. They were the same project.

The strict interpretation of standpoint theory was dangerous. It veered too close to relativism. It seemed to write off any capacity for empathy or emotional imagination. It could not explain, for instance, why someone like John Stuart Mill would care about women and strive to liberate them. It provided no justification for why people of one background often stood in solidarity with those from another. But a more moderate interpretation of standpoint theory provided a corrective to liberalism’s historic failures. It would acknowledge that people brought their social context to politics while rejecting the idea that they were forever to be a prisoner of that social context. Its moral lesson for liberalism was therefore quite simple. Lived experience was a data point. If liberalism listened to people, if it searched out the full range of human experience, it could discover and address restraints on freedom that it hadn’t previously identified. That required a degree of inquisitiveness and humility that was historically lacking.

The truth was, there was something terribly dangerous about standpoint theory. If interpreted in a strict way, it suggested that groups were homogeneous. By saying that someone’s views were defined by their social context, standpoint theory implied that everyone in that social context thought the same way. It robbed people of their individuality. This same problem also operated on the group’s external boundaries. By making information processing dependent on identity, strict standpoint theory rejected the human capacity for empathy. It suggested that groups had hard shells and were utterly distinct and separate from each other. And that’s when the abyss opened up again. This was relativism: the homogeneous inside and the blocked-off outside. Orwell’s nationalism. Berlin’s windowless boxes. Monolithic uniform blocks of humanity, unable to talk to or understand one another.

All the abstract dangers of identity politics were quickly becoming real. Individuals within marginalised groups were being airbrushed out of existence. Self-selecting leaders were able to present themselves as representatives of a homogeneous group, as the projection of its general will, when they had no legitimate claim to do so. The most conservative elements of political thought were able to define a community. And people were encouraged to see themselves as fundamentally different from other groups, even in conflict with them.

Crenshaw was bringing a welcome dose of complexity to what had been binary opposition around race – white/black – and gender – man/woman. Intersectionality argued that people’s lives were formed from multiple axes of social division, which worked together and influenced each other. They included not just race and gender, but also class, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, nation, religion and age. Examining anti-discrimination legislation, Crenshaw showed how black women were ignored by a legal system that was designed to prevent racism and sexism, but not their own unique form of disadvantage. Her approach helped to make the group identity discussion much more complex and ensured there was a focus on those who were marginalised within groups. But this was not a rejection of identity politics. It was an attempt to make it more sophisticated. Like the Combahee collective before her, Crenshaw believed there was something valuable in a political commitment to identity.

Who got to speak for these identity groups? On what basis did they have that mandate? Did people have to have that identity – of being black, or a woman, or a gay man – or could they choose to discard it? Could they refuse to be defined in that way? What actually was the political content of the identity, beyond a general desire for liberation? Was there agreement on what constituted liberation, or on the tactics for how to achieve it? How was that decided? What happened to the people who associated with that identity but did not agree with whatever they concluded? The response to these questions was typically that these issues would be worked out in a dialogue. But that raised the question of how that dialogue would take place. In reality, almost by definition, that dialogue took place between those who already agreed with identity politics, in whichever forum they were using. Campaigners became the leadership class of the group.

The first problem identity politics faced was what to do with its critics. Many campaigners began to treat challenges to their opinion as an act of ‘violence.’ Statements were collected around universities, activist movements and newspapers in which it was claimed that the presence – either in person or writing – of those who disputed identity politics made its members feel unsafe. This was a logical consequence of the group identity. If the individual was defined by the group, then it followed that any political attack on the group was an attack on the individual. The two things became indistinguishable. The notion that the personal was political now took on a grim new form, in which political speech was equivalent to personal victimisation.

There were two ways to deal with this problem. The first was the Marxist approach of accusing the dissenting individual of false consciousness – they had not grasped the authentic collective identity. They did not really know or understand what they were saying. They were too distorted by the power that had been inflicted upon them. Identity politics leaders would have to speak for their identity group and tell its members what their authentic social self really thought. The second was to strip the person of their identity altogether and claim that they were not really black, or not really gay, or not properly a woman, because if they had been, they would not have held those opinions. This second approach, which on the face of it was absurd, became quite common. When Peter Thiel, the gay Silicon Valley billionaire, expressed support for the Republicans in 2016, he was soon told that he was no longer entitled to his sexual identity. ‘By the logic of gay liberation, Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man,’ the writer Jim Downs wrote in Advocate magazine, ‘because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’

A new notion emerged, called cultural appropriation. It described the use of a culture’s ideas, intellectual property, traditions, symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture without permission. That included things like cuisine, dance, dress, language, music, traditional medicine and religious symbols. Under liberal thought, especially Constant and Mill, the mixing of people, cultures and ideas was considered to be intrinsically good. There was a fundamental underlying belief that by mixing ideas, greater truths could be discovered. And indeed on any typical cultural account of civilisation, collaboration and cross-fertilisation propelled the evolution of all the great pleasures of life, from music to recipes. But under identity politics, culture was increasingly becoming a battleground where hermetically sealed groups could not share ideas.

The cultural appropriation argument contained a grain of truth. Cultural mixing is frequently unequal and, historically, has often taken place as a result of war or colonialism. Even in peacetime, racism and inequality have tended to scar cultural exchange. It was because of racism, for instance, that the black pioneers of rock and roll were ignored, in favour of the white Elvis Presley. But the problem had been mislocated. In those instances, the issue was the racism, not the sharing.

There was a willing audience for the message of the new left-wing identity politics. It was right-wing identity politics.

The terror attacks on the US on 11th September 2001 delivered a crucial turning point in the narrative. They provided a villain. All the various abstract ideas of nativism could now be encapsulated in the image of the suicide bomber, looking to enslave the West. In many ways, 21st-Century Muslims took the role that Jews took during the Dreyfus Affair. They could be portrayed as capable of global conspiracy and yet simultaneously as crime-crazed thugs and rapists. As ever, the caricature made no logical sense. How could a group with the latter characteristics be clever enough to accomplish the former? But as before, that did not matter and was in fact useful. It meant Islam could be blamed for everything, from petty crime on the street to national humiliation on the global stage.

The immigration debate, for instance, was rarely framed as pure nativism. It was purposefully intertwined with economic concerns. Immigrants were coming to steal people’s jobs, or their benefits, or to put a strain on housing or public services. The immigrant offered a perfect symbol of industrial decline and reduced job security. They could encapsulate a variety of complex problems, with various causes and effects, in the same way that the Jew could encapsulate the reasons for France’s difficulties during the Dreyfus Affair.

The new nationalism was extremely multifaceted and diverse. It spanned from lonely internet users to presidents, from terrorists to respectable politicians. But in all guises it shared these central political ideas. The people were homogeneous. They were in a struggle against the elites. Immigration had to be stopped. There was no truth except for tribal identity. This was how the culture war began. It was the product of identity groups, on left and right, with no notion of the individual and no acceptance of shared values.

‘I wasn’t against Bret and I was against their methods and the protests,’ one mixed-race student said. ‘I was deemed a traitor. They explained that we are trying to give voice to those who don’t have a voice. I thought it was very ironic. The people who were telling me that they wanted to give a platform for minorities to speak weren’t listening to mine.

In that titanic struggle between two warring sets of tribes, liberalism was simply an afterthought. One by one, its principles were made irrelevant by a new political culture. There could be no compromise. There could be no step-by-step decision making, or reason, or objectivity. There could be no individuals. There was only the group. This was no longer the politics of how to change the world. It was the politics of who you were. And that was a zero-sum game.

Sherif’s experiment was intended to test whether competition for resources triggers group conflict, but it hinted at something broader – something fundamental in the human personality, a driving force deep in our psychology. We are instinctively prone to forming groups. This mechanism is so strong it can make us see things which are not there and think things which we know to be untrue.

Taylor and Mill had outlined the way that debate should operate in a free society. It required people to think for themselves, evaluate information rationally, be confident enough to seek out the strongest arguments against their position and humble enough to recognise where they might be wrong. This required autonomy – an ‘inward domain of consciousness’ that allowed for genuine ‘liberty of thought and feeling.’ There had to be a space within people – a calm, protective barrier against outside influences – for contemplation.

This was always a struggle. As with most of Taylor and Mill’s ideals, it was an aspiration. But when social media emerged, it seemed to recede altogether from view. And that happened for a quite simple reason. This technology was not designed to encourage rationality or independent judgement. It was designed to keep people constantly engaged. It prioritised methods it had learned from the advertising industry: a remorseless focus on maintaining user attention and the use of subconscious prompts in the emotional vulnerabilities of the human brain.

Advertisers understood that human beings – rushing to work, caring for a baby, visiting their parents – often didn’t have the time to sit and rationally decide what they wanted. Instead, they were susceptible to subconscious automatic behaviour. Their brains tended to follow certain pathways, which could be exploited for commercial gain. This is why products are often priced at £4.99 rather than just £5, say, or £799 instead of £800. Someone who took the time to think about the difference rationally would recognise that it was negligible. But the hurried, automatic part of the brain places undue priority on the first number it sees. Nearly everyone knows this is true, and yet nearly everyone is vulnerable to it. For a long time, this effect was relatively contained. Advertising took place within limited spaces in people’s lives. There was an advert in the newspaper, but they could skim over it. It came on during a television show, so they waited for it to end. It was plastered over a billboard, but they passed it by. Even when people chose to pay attention to the adverts, they were at least aware that someone was trying to influence them in a certain way. They knew they were experiencing advertising.

The internet changed that. It provided a massive amount of data showing almost every aspect of consumer behaviour. It could show which pages people viewed, in which order, what terms they searched for and when, what their interests were and what device they were using when they searched them out. It could follow them, from the point they clicked on an ad, to the selection of a product, to the page at which they inputted their payment details and ‘benchmark’ that data against the performance of their competitors.

Twitter and Facebook displayed infinitely scrolling news feeds that could be pulled down to be refreshed, just like a slot machine. The repeated use of red indicators and notifications made users come back time and again to see who had responded and what they had said. The slot machine variable reward function made people spend more money. The social media variable reward function made them spend more time. And people kept spending the time. A tsunami of information started to overwhelm their lives. Drag, scroll, click, repeat. On every device. All the time. Friend requests, likes, Facebook posts, tweets, retweets, WhatsApp messages, blogs, video clips, memes, gifs, real news, fake news, audio clips. An endless incessant wall of noise which users kept returning to, several times an hour, every day, all the time. Humankind’s basic relationship with the world – the way it received news, discussed politics, bought things, socialised, heard music, celebrated birthdays, communicated with parents, and accessed entertainment – was suddenly sucked into an advertising model which pulled every psychological trick it could find to encourage further engagement. The internal space that Taylor and Mill demanded started to shrink. Calm, properly contemplated rationality was alien to the advertising model. It operated instead in the world of emotional automaticity – desire and reward. People lost the time they needed to think, to define and pursue their goals, to reflect, to remember, to ...

People were living in a virtual world that reflected back their own subjective self. The news they saw, the products that were advertised, the views they came across, the advertising they clicked on – all of it was tailored around an algorithm’s assessment of their identity. The same applied to politics. People online were already prone to selecting the people they followed according to their bias. But the architecture of the online world drove that inclination even further. The sense of common humanity, or universal values, or national debate, or shared identity, began to recede. It was replaced by a personalised experience based on categories of identity. And those categories perfectly matched the groups given moral authority by identity politics.

When people began to realise this trend, they gave it a label: the echo chamber. It referred to an online space where a tribe would increasingly talk only to itself. But in fact this phrase was too modest. Echoes fade. These new tribal territories were more like feedback loops, in which messages contained did not fade, but increased in volume, becoming ever more extreme. This made identity ever more pivotal to people’s assessment of politics, and demanded strict adherence to increasingly radical statements about that group’s principles.

The YouTube algorithm was not based on how to make sure people came across alternate views so that it could preserve the health of liberal democracy. It was based, like that of other social media operations, purely on engagement. Initially, the website grounded it in ‘clicks to watch,’ but it then pivoted to ‘watchtime.’ Whatever got people watching longer was what mattered.

Saintliness was demonstrated by viciousness. By disparaging the supposed racist, the supposed animal murderer, the supposed metropolitan elite, the user could better demonstrate their own virtue. And that applied equally to those within their identity tribe. In fact, it worked better like that. If someone of high virtue was being shamed, it showed that the denigrater was even more virtuous. This drove the criteria for authorised public shaming remorselessly down, until no-one was safe. This daily moral outrage was a modern version of Taylor and Mill’s fear of the mob, of the catastrophic effect of majority rule on the minds of the eccentric and the unusual. It policed impure political thoughts, creating a climate of fear, shared by everyone, that they would be next, if they framed a thought on race, or sexuality, or identity, or politics, in anything but the most anodyne and inoffensive way.

This completely inverted Taylor and Mill’s insistence that people search for the strongest possible example of their opponent’s argument. Instead, the moral outrage function sought out the weakest and extreme version of the counter-argument, which it could then twist into an encapsulation of their general position. In fact, it was difficult to think of any forum for political debate that was further removed from that suggested by Taylor and Mill.

Orwell’s vision of the nationalist tendency – the group’s avoidance of challenging information and celebration of confirmatory information – now ran rampant. The notion of doubt faded away. In its place came a sense of fevered moral certainty. The idea that truth was something people needed to find, something to be searched for amid the clutter and noise of human error, something to reach for through debate, became old fashioned. It was a Victorian relic.

Trolls are people who post incendiary and distracting content online in a bid to disrupt any kind of meaningful discussion. For some time, the Russian state had been building up a troll army in order to exploit this development. They were based in troll factories, establishments hosting dozens of workers paid to produce and disseminate angry and deceptive material on the internet.

Between 2015 and 2017, over 30 million users shared Russian disinformation content on Instagram and Facebook accounts alone. They liked them. They commented on them. They spread them. The content was not uniform. It was carefully tailored to motivate the different identity groups on social media.

The most shared Russian disinformation Facebook post between 2015 and 2017 was an image of Yosemite Sam, the adversary of Bugs Bunny in the Looney Tunes cartoons, with two guns drawn and a confederate flag behind him. The text read: ‘I was banned from television for being too violent. Like and share if you grew up watching me on television, have a gun, and haven’t shot or killed anyone.’ It was aimed at conservatives. The most liked post on Instagram was an image of eight female legs of different skin tones, starting with white and ending with black. It read: ‘All the tones are nude. Get over it.’ It was published with hashtags like #blackandproud and #unapologeticallyblack and targeted at African Americans. These and other memes drove users to pages created by the disinformation campaign. And it was here that the real work of manipulating different identity groups was done. The pages had two primary functions: They would seek to divide communities against each other, and they would tailor specific incentives to each group to try to secure Russia’s optimal outcome in elections.

Conservatives were given content pitting immigrants against veterans, or pushing an anti-Muslim, or anti-Obama, agenda. African Americans were delivered content focusing on police violence against black people. The Russian-created Black Matters page, for instance, which described itself as a ‘fast-growing group of online activists,’ put out a message saying: ‘Cops kill black kids. Are you sure that your son won’t be the next?’ When it was eventually caught by Facebook and closed down, its Twitter account accused the company of ‘supporting white supremacy.’ In reality, all these accounts were being maintained by people in the same building. Analysis of the Russian disinformation campaign based on evidence provided to the Senate select committee on intelligence found many of these messages came from an identical IP address – a unique number linking online activity at a particular location. In some cases, accounts aggravating different groups against each other were being run from the same computer.

On 21st May 2016, two opposing protests took place outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston, Texas. One was organised on Facebook to oppose the centre by a group called Heart of Texas and the other to support it by a group called United Muslims of America. Many people saw the posts and attended, on both sides. The two demonstrations eventually descended into confrontation and verbal attacks. In fact, both protests had been organised by the Russian disinformation operation.

Russia’s aim was not limited to a specific political outcome. It was something more general: to convince the world that nothing could be relied on, that nothing could be guaranteed as true. ‘Look,’ the troll worker Bespalov said, ‘my parents use the internet. They used to read these sorts of comments and articles, to look at the memes and cartoons, and they used to believe them – like so many other people. Now they know it’s probably almost all fake. Now no-one believes anything anymore.’

Many people associated Trump and Johnson closely together. They both took leadership positions in their respective nationalist movements. They both lied incessantly. They both lacked intellectual consistency. And on a personal level they seemed to recognise that their projects were complementary to each other. But in fact the differences between them were subtle, counter-intuitive and important. Unlike Johnson, Trump was a committed nationalist and had been all his life. The target of his resentment changed – from Japan in the 1980s to Mexico in the 2010s. But the basic approach was always the same – a demand for America to come first and a suspicion and resentment of foreigners. He was less intelligent than Johnson and unable to place these positions within any kind of coherent ideological framework, but his instincts were reliably and uniformly racist, xenophobic and aggressive, like a ball covered in shattered glass.

Miller and Bannon were both conspiracy theorists. To them, the separation of powers was in fact the functioning of a ‘deep state’ that aimed to thwart the will of the people.

The wall defined Trump. It provided an easily comprehensible symbol of control, one which wasn’t restricted to keeping out immigrants. It echoed out to Trump’s message on trade and manufacturing. The country could be closed off to competition. The people who had been left behind by manufacturing decline could be insulated from the ravages of the economy. It shrank down the sense of anxiety over diversity and laissez-faire liberalism into a single, practical emblem. The wall also contained a broader message. It suggested that complex problems had simple solutions. All you needed was common sense and the will to achieve. Reality would then fall in line behind you. This fixation on simple solutions bolstered the notion of the deep state. Once you accepted that the world was simple, it followed that any obstacle to the implementation of a solution did not come from its inherent complications but from an internal conspiracy – a plot by the elite to undermine the people’s will.

The lies started immediately. In the days before his inauguration, Trump boasted there would be ‘an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.’ In the end, it was a subdued affair, far less full than for the inauguration of Obama eight years earlier and with several empty areas on the parade route. The next morning, the president personally demanded that the director of the National Park Service produce aerial photographs of the crowds. A government photographer was then asked to doctor the images to cut out the empty spaces. When the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, briefed the press on the event, he insisted it was ‘the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,’ and accused the media of downplaying its size to ‘lessen the enthusiasm.’ The comment on audience size was subsequently refuted, prompting Trump’s spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, to say that Spicer had merely used ‘alternative facts.’

The Trump administration used deceit to distract opponents and evade policy scrutiny. By constantly churning out falsehoods, Trump could ensure that the media’s ability to focus on one story was severely diminished. There would be a debilitating wave of constant news, and constant misleading statements, so that everything was eventually drowned out. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon said. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ By the summer of 2020, Trump had made over 18,000 false or misleading claims. During 2018, he averaged 15 erroneous claims a day.

He lied about big things and small things. He lied about damaging stories, like the payments his attorney said he authorised to silence women alleging affairs with him. But he also lied, pointlessly, about events which would have otherwise portrayed him in a favourable light.

Court rulings which went against the president were treated as an attack by the deep state, both by the administration itself and its outriders in the media. Sean Hannity, a presenter on Fox News who would dine with the president in the White House, said: ‘All of this is happening because of the deep state. It’s now the deep state gone rogue. The deep state against the American people.’ Like Orbán, Trump’s sabotage was not limited to the courts. He also went after scientific bodies, particularly over the issue of climate change, which he insisted was a hoax perpetrated by China ‘in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.’

Trump’s new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency denied any link between CO2 and climate change. Another climate change conspiracy theorist, Jim Bridenstine, was appointed to head NASA, the world’s most important space agency. Even the independent, Republic-headed Congressional Budget Office, which produced data-heavy assessment reports on the economic impacts of policies, was branded part of the deep state. When it provided a cost and impact assessment of a short-lived Trump health-care proposal in 2017, the White House branded it ‘little more than fake news.’ Gingrich said: ‘Here’s the Congressional Budget Office as part of the deep state doing a hit job on the Senate Republicans.’ Bob Mueller, the FBI special counsel put in charge of investigating Russian disinformation interference in the election results, was branded the tip of the ‘deep state spear.’ Trump retweeted a rant by Hannity saying the investigation showed the deep state was ‘a clear and present danger to this country and to you.’

By 2015, there were 150,000 people a year taking boats across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Italy. Around 2,300 a day were using an alternate route in the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece. In total, 1.3 million people claimed asylum in the European Union that year.

An executive order was produced banning citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days. As a national security argument, it made no sense. The Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence office found citizenship of a country was an ‘unreliable indicator’ of terrorist threat. Out of 82 people convicted of terrorism in the US since the start of the Syrian War in 2011, about half were US-born. The rest came from 26 different countries, most of which were unaffected by Trump’s ban, including Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. But the warnings that it would be ineffective were treated as the resistance of the deep state.

As before, the institutions held firm. Multiple court cases sprang up. In 2018, a federal court judge imposed a nationwide injunction, forcing the administration to put the termination on hold. Again, the system of checks and balances worked. But again, for the people themselves, it meant life on stand-by, relying on a safety net which could be cut away at any moment.

Nationalism claims that liberalism represents the powerful. In fact, liberalism is the shield that protects the powerless. It is the safeguard for those who have no other defences.

Liberalism is not dead, as much as some people would like it to be. But it is in a battle for its life. What happens next is not set. It will hinge on what liberals do. That response will be based on two things: Confidence and humility. We will require the confidence to stand up for our values and the humility to understand what has gone wrong, so that we can address it.

liberal values: the freedom of the individual, reason, consent in government, individual rights, the separation of powers, protection of minorities, autonomy and moderation.

Complacency allowed liberalism to fossilise. Fear left it exposed. And nationalism could then, with shocking ease, shatter it into pieces.

Liberalism had an internal tension from the very beginning. It first emerged in the Putney debates and John Locke’s writing. Eventually, this tension fissured liberalism into two wings – laissez-faire on the one hand and egalitarianism on the other. The philosophy of let-things-be and the philosophy of shake-things-up.