No doubt it had much to do with Trump’s nativist appeal, his superior campaigning skills, his gangsterish charisma. But there was, I believe, something deeper going on: a rejection of the intolerance which has come to be emblematic of American progressivism. Paradoxically, the champions of diversity have become the enforcers of conformity – in language, in attitudes, in narratives of history, across every cultural landscape.
In the course of two generations, liberalism – a political philosophy whose genesis is a commitment to individual freedom – has mutated into one which demands adherence to orthodoxy – and is ruthlessly intolerant of deviations from its worldview. The doe-eyed, guitar-strumming flower children of the 1960s had become, by the 2020s, the flint-eyed, pitchfork-clutching puritans of American Gothic.
Last year, Americans reacted against being told what they were allowed to think.
Where did American liberalism go wrong? By forgetting that liberalism is, at heart, a philosophy whose paramount value is freedom. The great freedoms – of worship, of speech, of association – demand that every citizen enjoy those rights in equal measure. None is more central than freedom of thought. This means protecting deviation, eccentricity and the right to express views that may offend mainstream values. Not by ordaining favoured opinions to be “politically correct”, while censuring – or censoring – others.
I have always thought there is something vaguely Maoist about the term “political correctness”, implying (as it does) that opinions are not contestable, but objectively right or wrong, while holding “incorrect” opinions is impermissible. Yet that is the trap into which American liberals have fallen.
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From around the 1970s, concern for equality – and, in particular, for the equality of hitherto marginalised groups – supplanted freedom as the core liberal value. In 1971, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice – probably the most important work of Western political philosophy in the past half-century. Rawls and his disciples, including Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously), Bruce Ackerman (Social Justice in the Liberal State), among others, foregrounded egalitarian rather than libertarian values as the heart of liberalism. Dworkin (who taught me at Oxford in the 1980s), argued that the core liberal value was the right to “equal concern and respect”. All other liberal values were derivative from that principle.
There is no reason whatever why the equal protection of all citizens – and in particular the greater inclusion of the disempowered – should come at the cost of restricting fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression. A society which is tolerant because it is inclusive can also be a society that is tolerant because it is respectful of divergent views. They are not alternatives: the concept of diversity encompasses both. Yet for American liberals, the one type of diversity that has become suspect is diversity of opinion, where that challenges liberal pieties.
Last year, Americans reacted against being told what they were allowed to think.
In the midst of World War II, American jurist Learned Hand delivered a short speech, famous as one of the most eloquent paeans to liberty. He located the spirit of liberty in an unexpected virtue: humility. “The spirit of liberty,” he said “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right”.
Whether it is to be found in the attractive intellectual humility of Learned Hand in 1944, or Barack Obama’s plea 80 years later for liberals to rediscover pluralism, it is that appreciation that a liberal society must value diversity of opinion as much as it values social and cultural diversity, that has often been lost in the past half-century.
There are many reasons the world is blighted by the return of Donald Trump. American liberalism’s abandonment of pluralism and intellectual humility is not the least of them.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.
