Liberalism and Its Illiberal Shadow

When a Sound Idea Acquires a Bad Reputation

Liberalism should not be difficult to defend. Its basic commitments are now woven into the moral language of most modern democracies. Human dignity should be respected. Citizens should be equal before the law. Governments should not exercise unlimited power. People should be free to speak, think, worship, associate, and disagree. Minorities should not be deprived of their rights simply because they are minorities. Those who face poverty, illness, disability, discrimination, or social exclusion should not be abandoned.

Few reasonable people reject all of these principles. Even those who describe themselves as conservative often support them. They may disagree about how rights should be balanced, how far the state should intervene, or how social welfare should be funded, but they do not necessarily oppose the moral foundations of liberal society.

This makes the present distrust surrounding liberalism difficult to explain. Why has a word associated with freedom, tolerance, and human dignity become a source of fatigue or irritation for many people? Why do some voters react negatively when politicians or activists identify themselves as liberal, even though those same voters may support freedom of expression, equal opportunity, and protection for vulnerable groups?

One common answer is that liberalism asks too much of comfortable people. It asks those who possess wealth, status, or social advantages to surrender part of what they have for the benefit of others. In this interpretation, liberalism becomes unpopular because it demands moral sacrifice. People may approve of helping the weak in theory, but they resist when assistance requires higher taxes, institutional reform, or changes to familiar customs.

There is some truth in that explanation. Every political program eventually encounters the resistance of those who fear losing something. Yet it does not fully account for the present reaction. Many people who distrust contemporary liberal politics are not opposed to human rights, social welfare, or minority protection. What they distrust is the political behavior of certain people and institutions that claim to represent those values.

The problem may therefore lie less in liberalism itself than in the habitus that has grown around it. Habitus refers not merely to a set of explicit ideas, but to a recurring disposition, a way of speaking, judging, and responding. In the present case, it includes moral certainty, impatience with disagreement, public denunciation, selective outrage, and an assumption that anyone who questions a favored policy must be hostile to the people that policy claims to protect.

A person may support equal treatment while objecting to ideological policing. A voter may value social welfare while becoming frustrated with politicians who devote disproportionate attention to symbolic scandals. A citizen may believe in minority rights while resisting the claim that only one political vocabulary can express compassion. Such people are not necessarily rejecting liberalism. They may be reacting against an illiberal style that has adopted liberal language.

This distinction matters. Without it, critics are easily dismissed as enemies of progress, while activists are relieved of the responsibility to examine their own conduct. Liberalism then becomes identified with whatever its most aggressive representatives choose to do. The result is a strange reversal. A tradition founded partly on freedom of conscience and limits on authority begins to appear as a demand for ideological obedience.

The Traditions We Have Learned to Confuse

Part of the confusion comes from the way several different political traditions have been combined in ordinary conversation. Liberalism, progressivism, the political left, Marxism, and contemporary social activism often overlap, but they are not identical.

Liberalism is fundamentally concerned with the freedom and legal standing of individuals. It seeks to limit arbitrary power and protect citizens from coercion, whether that coercion comes from the state, a religious authority, a social majority, or another institution. Liberalism assumes that people will disagree about morality, religion, culture, and the good life. Its task is not to eliminate those disagreements, but to create conditions under which people can live together without one group possessing unlimited power over the rest.

Progressivism places greater emphasis on reform. It asks where existing institutions fail, where inherited customs produce injustice, and how society might become more equal or inclusive. The progressive instinct is dissatisfied with the claim that something should remain simply because it has existed for a long time.

Conservatism begins from a different concern. It asks what valuable functions are carried by existing practices and institutions, even when those functions are not immediately visible. It remembers that societies contain accumulated experience and that rapid change can produce damage that reformers did not anticipate. Conservatism does not have to mean resistance to every change. At its best, it is an ethic of prudence, continuity, responsibility, and respect for the limits of human planning.

The political left has historically been associated with challenges to hierarchy, inherited privilege, and inequality. The political right has generally placed greater value on order, tradition, authority, property, national continuity, or differentiated social roles. These descriptions are broad, and their meanings vary across countries and historical periods. A left-wing party in government can become defensive and institutional, while a right-wing opposition can present itself as a revolutionary force against an established elite.

Marxism belongs to yet another tradition. It offers a structural interpretation of society centered on material conditions, ownership, class relations, and conflict. It does not simply request reform within a liberal order. In many of its revolutionary forms, it seeks to transform the underlying economic structure from which political and social institutions are understood to arise.

Contemporary social activism may draw selectively from all these sources. It may speak in the liberal language of rights, the progressive language of reform, the left-wing language of inequality, and the Marxist language of structural power. It may also adopt techniques shaped by social media, public relations, branding, and online group behavior. The resulting movement is not always philosophically coherent.

This is why a campaign may call itself liberal while acting against liberal principles. It may defend inclusion while narrowing the range of acceptable opinion. It may promote diversity while showing little tolerance for intellectual, religious, or moral diversity. It may invoke safety while weakening freedom of discussion. It may demand accountability while ignoring due process.

Criticism of such conduct is not necessarily a rejection of liberalism. In some cases, the criticism is liberal in the deeper sense. It asks that individuals not be punished without fair examination, that speech not be suppressed merely because it is offensive, and that political authority remain open to criticism. The conflict is then not between liberalism and conservatism, but between liberal pluralism and an illiberal form of activism.

This distinction also clarifies the role of reform and preservation. A mature society does not choose permanently between them. Reform asks what must change. Conservation asks what must not be carelessly destroyed. Without reform, injustice becomes tradition. Without preservation, every inherited institution is treated as disposable, and society becomes material for endless reconstruction.

The ideal relationship resembles what the German philosophical tradition calls Aufhebung, a movement that negates, preserves, and carries forward at the same time. It is not a simple compromise in which each side gives up half of its position. It is a transformation that retains what was valid in the earlier form while overcoming what had become inadequate.

Political maturity therefore requires more than victory by one side. It requires the ability to preserve freedom while correcting exclusion, maintain order while reforming unjust practices, and protect institutions while keeping them accountable.

From Moral Conviction to Moral Permission

Every serious political movement begins with convictions. Human beings need moral principles because practical decisions cannot be made without judgments about what is valuable. The danger does not begin with conviction itself. It begins when conviction becomes certainty about one’s own moral infallibility.

The process often starts with claims that are difficult to oppose. Human dignity should be protected. Discrimination should be challenged. Vulnerable people should not be abandoned. Public institutions should not humiliate or exclude citizens without justification.

The next step is less visible. One particular interpretation of dignity, discrimination, vulnerability, or inclusion is treated as the only morally legitimate interpretation. A disagreement over policy is then recast as a disagreement over whether certain people deserve to exist or be respected.

A person who questions whether a policy will work may be described as indifferent to suffering. Someone who asks for evidence may be accused of denying another person’s experience. A concern about costs or unintended consequences may be interpreted as hostility toward the group that the policy is meant to assist.

Political discussion then moves from the question of what should be done to the question of who is morally acceptable. Opponents are no longer people who may be mistaken. They become obstacles to justice.

Once that shift occurs, aggression can acquire moral permission. Public humiliation becomes accountability. Exclusion becomes protection. Censorship becomes safety. The destruction of a reputation becomes an act of solidarity with the vulnerable.

Those engaging in such behavior may not experience themselves as aggressive. They believe they are responding to aggression already embedded in society. If existing language, institutions, and customs are described as forms of violence, then forceful action against them can appear defensive.

This is one reason the contradiction within some diversity movements is so striking. Diversity is celebrated at the level of race, gender, nationality, sexuality, and cultural background. Yet diversity of thought is often treated with suspicion, particularly when it concerns religion, family, morality, national identity, or political philosophy.

The result is a narrow form of pluralism. People from many backgrounds are welcomed, provided that they adopt a similar vocabulary and reach similar conclusions. Difference is accepted as identity but resisted as judgment.

A liberal society cannot tolerate every action. Threats, coercion, harassment, and violence must be restrained. Yet it must also distinguish between harm and disagreement. When every disturbing statement is treated as violence, the category of protection expands until it becomes a means of controlling ordinary thought and speech.

The central liberal insight is not that every opinion is equally reasonable. It is that human beings are fallible, including those who believe they are acting for justice. Institutions must therefore leave room for dissent, correction, and the possibility that a morally confident majority may be wrong.

Without that humility, the language of compassion can become a form of domination. The movement may continue to speak on behalf of the weak while exercising power over anyone who questions its authority to define weakness, justice, or harm.

The Memory Behind the Fear

People who react strongly to cancel culture, ideological conformity, or public denunciation are sometimes accused of exaggeration. Contemporary activist movements are clearly not equivalent to the regimes responsible for mass executions, forced labor, famine, and genocide in the twentieth century. A dispute on social media is not the Cultural Revolution. The loss of a professional opportunity is not the Khmer Rouge.

These differences must be stated plainly. Historical suffering should not be reduced to a metaphor for every present discomfort.

Yet people may still recognize similarities at the level of political psychology. Their concern is not necessarily that history has already repeated itself. It is that certain patterns of moral reasoning feel familiar.

The Cultural Revolution showed how young people could be mobilized against teachers, parents, scholars, officials, and cultural institutions. People were divided according to political purity. Personal relationships were subordinated to ideological loyalty. Humiliation and violence were justified as necessary stages in the destruction of an unjust order.

The Khmer Rouge carried the logic of revolutionary purity even further. Intellectual life, professional knowledge, religion, urban society, and ordinary family bonds were treated as obstacles to the creation of a new social order. The result was not liberation, but terror and death on an immense scale.

The Soviet experience also showed how a movement claiming to represent workers and historical progress could create a new political class protected from criticism. Once the ruling party was identified with the direction of history, disagreement became counterrevolutionary. Political error was no longer an ordinary human possibility. It became evidence of betrayal.

These systems did not arise simply because some people cared too much about equality. They emerged from a combination of moral certainty, historical determinism, concentrated power, and the removal of institutions capable of correction.

The revolutionary worldview gave conflict a final direction. One class represented the future, while another represented the past. Those aligned with the future possessed moral legitimacy. Those associated with the old order became obstacles to humanity’s liberation.

This structure made cruelty easier to justify. If history itself had rendered judgment, there was little need to listen to those placed on the wrong side. Their suffering could be interpreted as the cost of progress.

The lesson is not that every social reform leads toward totalitarianism. The lesson is that a movement claiming moral authority must explain how it will limit its own power. It is not enough to describe the injustice it opposes. It must also show how it will protect those who remain unconvinced.

This is where liberalism, properly understood, provides its own safeguard. Freedom of speech, due process, political opposition, legal equality, and limits on state authority are not secondary details. They are protections against the transformation of righteous intention into unchecked power.

When activists dismiss such protections as obstacles created by privileged groups, they weaken the very structure that prevents political disagreement from becoming persecution. They may still call themselves liberal, but they have abandoned the humility on which liberal institutions depend.

The fear people express today is therefore not always fear of compassion or reform. It may be fear of a familiar moral grammar, one that divides society into the innocent and the guilty, rewards denunciation, and treats doubt as betrayal.

Scandal, Spectacle, and Deformed Priorities

This moral habitus also affects ordinary democratic politics. Parliamentary oversight is necessary. Politicians should be questioned about misconduct, conflicts of interest, election irregularities, and abuses of office. Investigative journalism can reveal matters that official institutions would prefer to ignore.

The problem is not that a report first published in a weekly magazine should never be discussed in the legislature. The problem is proportion.

A controversy may deserve investigation, but it should not consume political attention for days or weeks while larger questions remain neglected. A country still needs to discuss economic growth, wages, taxation, social welfare, demographic decline, energy security, technological change, defense, and international relations.

When a single scandal dominates the national conversation beyond its practical significance, the priorities of democratic government become deformed. Political parties may gain short-term attention while weakening public trust in the legislature itself.

Opposition parties are especially vulnerable to this pattern because criticism is part of their institutional role. They are expected to examine the government and expose failures. Yet criticism can gradually become an identity rather than a function.

A party that defines itself mainly through opposition may become skilled at identifying mistakes while losing the ability to present a credible alternative. It may learn how to produce outrage without learning how to govern. Its supporters may reward every attack on the administration, even when the attack contributes little to public understanding.

This creates a difficult cycle. The party receives attention for scandal rather than policy, so it invests more energy in scandal. The media amplifies the conflict because personal controversy is easier to communicate than economic policy. Citizens become frustrated with the lack of substantive debate, which deepens distrust toward political institutions.

The media’s role is central. Complex policy questions require time, knowledge, context, and an acceptance of uncertainty. Scandal offers recognizable characters, clear villains, emotional language, and short clips that circulate easily.

A headline about a personal accusation can be understood immediately. An explanation of monetary policy, demographic trends, defense planning, or pension reform demands sustained attention. Under commercial pressure, media organizations are naturally tempted toward the material that produces faster reactions.

This does not mean that every newspaper, broadcaster, or magazine consciously manipulates the public. The incentives can work without conspiracy. Editors choose stories that attract attention. Political commentators emphasize conflict. Social media rewards indignation. Audiences click on material that confirms what they already suspect.

The accumulated effect is a political culture in which symbolic victories receive more attention than practical outcomes. A politician may be celebrated for an aggressive speech while contributing little to legislation. An activist may gain influence through accusation without accepting responsibility for the consequences. A news organization may present itself as defending democracy while depending on the conflict that erodes democratic trust.

People observing this environment may conclude that liberal politics is the problem. Yet what they are often rejecting is not liberal concern for justice. It is a style of politics that substitutes performance for judgment and moral excitement for proportion.

The Broken Common Forum

Modern society does not suffer from a lack of information. Citizens receive more news, commentary, video, opinion, and analysis than any previous generation. The deeper problem is that this abundance no longer produces a shared public world.

People increasingly inhabit separate information environments. Each political group has its preferred media, experts, commentators, and interpretations. Each side closely observes the dishonesty of the other while overlooking the failures of its own allies.

Facts that should be open to common examination become markers of group identity. Accepting or rejecting a claim signals political loyalty. Corrections circulate less widely than accusations because corrections are less emotionally satisfying.

This weakens the media’s ability to function as a common forum. Journalism should not require every outlet to reach the same conclusion, nor should fairness mean refusing to distinguish between truth and falsehood. A healthy media environment can contain competing interpretations while maintaining shared standards of evidence, context, correction, and proportionality.

Those standards become difficult to sustain when the commercial value of attention exceeds the civic value of accuracy. A misleading headline may reach millions before a correction appears. A selectively edited video may shape public judgment even after the full recording becomes available. A speculative claim can remain in public memory long after it has been weakened by later evidence.

Bias, error, misinformation, and disinformation should not be treated as identical. A journalist can make a mistake without intending to deceive. A report can be framed unfairly while remaining factually accurate in a narrow sense. An institution can display persistent bias without every employee participating in a coordinated plan.

Nevertheless, repeated distortion has consequences even when intention is difficult to prove. If audiences notice that similar conduct is judged differently depending on political affiliation, they stop trusting the institution. If corrections are reluctant or hidden, error begins to resemble dishonesty. If commentary and reporting are blurred, the audience can no longer tell whether it is receiving information or persuasion.

Foreign influence operations benefit from this weakness. A state engaging in cognitive warfare does not need to invent every conflict. It can identify genuine divisions, amplify the most inflammatory narratives, and increase suspicion between groups.

The most effective manipulation may include many true facts. Its power lies in selection, repetition, emotional framing, and omission. A genuine scandal can be exaggerated until it appears to define an entire political system. A legitimate disagreement can be presented as proof that society is collapsing. A controversial statement can be circulated without the context that gives it meaning.

China is often discussed in relation to such operations because it has strong strategic interests in weakening confidence within rival democracies. Yet accusations of foreign manipulation should also be made carefully. If every domestic criticism is dismissed as foreign influence, the defense against cognitive warfare becomes another form of censorship.

The stronger response is to improve the resilience of the public sphere. Citizens need reliable access to evidence, transparent corrections, serious policy discussion, and institutions willing to criticize their own side. Without these habits, even accurate information can be absorbed into tribal conflict.

The loss is not merely trust in particular newspapers or broadcasters. It is the ability of society to discuss common problems without first fighting over the existence of common reality.

Recovering Liberalism Through Restraint

The present crisis should not lead to the abandonment of liberalism. It should lead to its recovery.

Human rights remain necessary. Freedom of speech remains necessary. Social welfare remains necessary. Minorities still need legal protection, and political authority still requires limits. None of these principles becomes false because certain activists apply them aggressively or certain institutions defend them inconsistently.

The answer is not to replace liberal certainty with conservative certainty. Conservatism has its own forms of failure. Respect for tradition can become an excuse for protecting injustice. Concern for order can justify repression. National loyalty can be transformed into hostility toward outsiders or critics. A leader who promises stability may weaken the institutions that make peaceful political correction possible.

Both liberalism and conservatism therefore need internal restraints.

Liberalism needs conservative prudence. It must remember that institutions often perform functions that reformers do not immediately understand. It must consider unintended consequences, social continuity, and the limits of political planning. It must resist the temptation to reconstruct society according to an abstract image of moral perfection.

Conservatism needs liberal criticism. It must recognize that inherited institutions can contain exclusion, cruelty, and unjust privilege. Stability is not sufficient if the stable order denies some citizens dignity or opportunity. Tradition deserves respect, but not immunity from examination.

The relationship between these forces should not be imagined as a permanent war between good and evil. A functioning political society allows reformers to expose injustice and conservatives to expose imprudence. Institutions then require both sides to justify themselves through evidence, law, persuasion, and public accountability.

This continuing process resembles Aufhebung. What is inadequate is challenged, but what remains valuable is preserved. Reform does not begin from zero, and preservation does not mean refusing all movement.

A recovered liberalism would defend human dignity without claiming moral infallibility. It would protect minorities while preserving the right to disagreement. It would recognize emotional injury without classifying every objection as violence. It would criticize power while remembering that activism, media, academia, and cultural institutions can also acquire power.

It would understand that tolerance is tested not by our treatment of people who already agree with us, but by our treatment of those whose conclusions we find difficult. It would not require approval of every opinion, but it would resist the desire to remove every opponent from legitimate public life.

Political movements should be judged not only by the good they promise. Nearly every movement promises justice, peace, dignity, prosperity, or liberation. The more revealing test is what happens when people remain unconvinced.

Are they answered or denounced? Are they treated as citizens or enemies? Are they permitted to organize, speak, teach, publish, vote, and criticize? Can the movement admit error, revise its policies, and surrender power?

Liberalism becomes worth defending when it can answer these questions with restraint. Its strength does not lie in the certainty that it has reached the final moral truth. It lies in the recognition that no person, party, institution, or generation should possess enough power to make its own certainty compulsory.

What is becoming unpopular today may not be liberalism itself. It may be liberalism’s illiberal shadow, the political style that speaks of diversity while narrowing discussion, invokes compassion while granting itself permission to punish, and claims to resist power while refusing to examine its own.

The task is not to discard the language of freedom and human dignity. It is to separate those principles from the aggression that has attached itself to them, and to restore the humility without which a liberal society cannot remain liberal.

Photo by Hussain Badshah on Unsplash