The Closing of the Liberal Mind

How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left

Kim R. Holmes

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781594039560
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently Acting Senior Vice President for Research at The Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite—illiberalism—abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today's liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism—a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Joe Burris, “Student Suspended for Pop-Tart Gun, Josh Welch, Files Appeal with Maryland County School System,” Baltimore Sun, March 3, 2013; see also Alexandra Petri, “Pop-Tart ‘Gun’ Suspension: Seriously, Folks?,” Washington Post, March 5, 2013.

2 Petula Dvorak, “Free-Range Kids and Our Parenting Police State,” Washington Post, April 13, 2015.

3 The differences between the moderate Enlightenment and the radical Enlightenment are discussed later in this volume.

CHAPTER ONE

1 S. V. Dáte, “O’Malley, Sanders Shouted Down at Netroots by ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protest,” National Journal, July 18, 2015.

2 Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 10–11. Kindle edition.

3 Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 4.

4 See Fawcett, Liberalism, pp. 34–35; and Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 177.

5 See, e.g., Steven Lukes, Individualism (Colchester: European Consortium for Political Research Press, 1973).

6 Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, p. 4. Emphasis added.

7 François Guizot, History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, trans. Andrew R. Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861), p. 264.

8 Fawcett, Liberalism, pp. 118–19.

9 Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 Sept. 1789,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 32, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); see also Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, “Popular Basis of Political Authority,” in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, vol. 1, chap. 2, document 23 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

10 For an analysis of these ideas, see Fawcett, Liberalism, pp. 120–21.

11 Ibid., p. 120.

12 Ibid., p. 127.

13 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1991). First published by Harcourt, Brace & World (New York), 1955.

14 Richard Allen Epstein, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

15 Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 1961).

16 Madison, for example, wrote in Federalist No. 49 that “[t]he passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” Ibid., p. 317.

17 Ibid., p. 322.

18 Ibid., p. 324.

19 Ibid., pp. 324–25.

20 John C. Calhoun, “A Positive Good,” Speech in the U.S. Senate (1837), http://www.stolaf.edu/people/fitz/COURSES/calhoun.html.

21 In order to secure Southern votes for the Constitution, the framers agreed to a provision that gave the states twenty years to eliminate the slave trade. Madison argued at the Constitutional Convention that even those twenty years were “dishonorable.” In Federalist No. 42, he wrote that it would be a “great gain” that a “period of twenty years may terminate for ever within these States,” a practice he called “unnatural” and “the barbarism of modern policy.” Matthew Spalding, ed., The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2014), p. 196; see also Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, p. 266.

22 See, e.g., M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996).

23 Wilson, who argued for his administration’s policy of segregation in federal departments, once said: “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” William Loren Katz, Eyewitness: The Negro in American History (New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1967), pp. 389–90. Croly wrote, “The Southern slave owners . . . were right, moreover, in believing the negroes were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of the white men.” Herbert David Croly, The Promise of American Life (Los Angeles: Library of Alexandria, 2012), ch. 4, section II, paragraph 2. Kindle edition.

24 “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York: Brentano, 1920), chap. 18, republished by Bartleby at http://www.bartleby.com/1013/18.html.

25 Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, “Abrams v. United States (1919),” in Documents of American Constitutional and Legal History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 666–67.

26 George Novack, “American Intellectuals and the Crisis,” New International, February 1936, pp. 23–27, and June 1936, pp. 83–86.

27 Marisa Schultz, “Obama Says N-Word in Racism Discussion,” New York Post, June 22, 2015.

28 Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 310.

29 Ibid., p. 312...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• One: The Decline of American Liberalism
• Two: The Rise of the Postmodern Left
• Three: Why the Postmodern Left Is Not Liberalism
• Four: The Illiberal Style of Liberal Politics Today
• Five: Promethean Government Unbound
• Six: Bullies, Shaming Rituals, and the Culture of Intolerance
• Seven: The Death of the Liberal Intellectual
• Eight: The Troubled Legacy of the Radical Enlightenment
• Nine: The Closing of the Liberal Mind
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index