Donald Trump is the 47th President of the Unites States of America. In a vote that was less about left vs right than about establishment vs anti-elitism, Trump won with a coalition of religious conservatives, blue-collar workers, ex-democrats, anti-war activists, the “new right” and libertarians.
But should libertarians support him? There are several libertarian arguments that could be made for Trump: he wants to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, his economic policy is a mixed bag but good on deregulation and taxes, he has wowed to take a knife to the administrative state. But the best reason to support Trump is that he promises to enter the culture wars on the side of being less socially tolerant. Because tolerance, despite its popular standing as a value which is beyond question, is, in fact, perhaps the most fatal weakness of Westen liberal societies.
Liberalism, as it emerged as the key political idea of the Enlightenment, was founded on a set of values that centres the individual as the object of moral action. Foremost among these were political rights such individual liberty, property rights, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Commitment to democratic government followed, seen as the best way to uphold these values. And for the individual to thrive and to underpin the pluralistic society they set out to foster, liberals became dedicated to tolerance of different beliefs, lifestyles and opinions. Before long, a progressive strain of liberalism became dominant, emphasising social justice, understood as the state’s responsibility to ensure fairness in distribution of opportunities and resources, and seeing political action and reform as the tools to achieve constant societal progress.
It is these ideas on which our modern western democracies are founded. But the lofty expectations of a new world order, where individuals would never again be oppressed by their governments and nations would live in respectful peace with one another, did not materialise. Instead, the first half of the 20th century saw two global wars and the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. And while these events did not change the dominance of liberalism as a political ideal, it did lead to scrutiny of its bases, to understand what went wrong and ensure it did not happen again.
The key lesson that the West took from the experience was that it needed to be on guard against anti-liberal ideas fermenting and undermining pluralism and democracy. Best expressed in Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, it meant a commitment to be intolerant of the intolerant. The Frankfurt School prodigy, Herbert Marcuse, took that idea to an extreme with his concept of liberating tolerance, which basically amounts to a call for authoritarian suppression of the right.
Then, under the slogan “the personal is political”, the progressive student protest of the 1960s broke with the original idea of liberalism being a concept that pertains first and foremost to the political arena. And as the social justice movement gained foothold, first in academia but since the early 2000s increasingly in mainstream society, the bar for what should be considered intolerant was fast and decisively moved lower. It was then enforced through political action and activism to implement Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies across our institutions: in government, education, media and corporations. The explanation for why the left has apparently become opposed to free speech is found in their commitment to the paradox of tolerance: as the standard for what is deemed intolerant has moved to now include things like cat-calling or refusing to use neo-pronouns, society at large and the state have been called on to intervene to preserve an ostensibly tolerant society by curtailing offensive speech.
But there is a problem. Liberalism generally holds that there are universal standards of justice and the moral good, as expressed most obviously in the concept of human rights. But in today’s multicultural and pluralistic societies these beliefs intersect with a fervent commitment to tolerance of and openness to a myriad of cultural ideas and behaviours. In this context, the imperative of tolerance manifests in a belief that respecting diversity and individual autonomy means acknowledging that moral standards are contextual and should not be imposed. The contradiction is obvious.
In practice most progressive/liberal societies have become increasingly intolerant of views that contradict central liberal values, but they have done so in a way that focusses their intolerance on what identity politics consider to be groups that hold incommensurate power in society and in aide of groups that are considered oppressed by Western cultural hegemony. As such, countries like Britan have identified certain protected characteristics—race, sex, disability, religion—against which expressed intolerance is unlawful, enabling a crackdown on things that are considered intolerant toward “oppressed” group identities, but maintaining the ability to be intolerant towards ideas that are considered dangerous.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a counterreaction. Post-liberalism is anti-elitist and heralds traditionalism and religion, and questions democracy, the universality of tolerance and even individualism, seeing it as taking unwarranted primacy over the common good. It also promotes ethnopluralism, challenging multiculturalism by proposing that people of different ethnicities and cultures should maintain separate communities rather than integrate. And there is serious opposition building against the globalist hegemony that is expressed not only in free trade but more importantly in the primacy of supranational institutions such as the UN and NATO. The overarching theme is that the protection of traditional values and customs, in the interest of the common good, should be the central aim of political action.
Of course, the libertarian right has always been opposed to state enforced morality, but a split has emerged between those who base their libertarianism simply in strict enforcement of property rights and those who see tolerant social views as a key component of what it means to believe in individual liberty. The latter, however, simply plays into the hands of progressive identity politics. The paleo-libertarianism of Murray Rothbard foreshadowed today’s problems, advocating already in the 1990s for an alliance between libertarian market absolutism and cultural conservatism. This is the way.
The so-called Breitbart Doctrine states that “politics is downstream from culture”, capturing the inescapable fact that, in a democracy, to affect lasting change to the direction of policy we must first affect cultural change. There are dangers in the post-liberal anti-individualism, but the important battle of our age is against progressive liberalism. There is therefore reason to celebrate the election of Donald Trump as President of the US. Trump himself is no ideologue, and even if he has on his team people who would take things in an ultimately wrong direction (J.D. Vance, the next VP, has strong post-liberal leanings), for now, he is an ally of those who think putting the brakes on the cultural slide towards the ideal of social tolerance is long overdue.