Progressive regression

Kim Holmes, a former assistant secretary of state and Heritage Foundation vice president, is the author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind.

Your new book examines a stream of liberalism going back several centuries, and shows that postmodern liberals are very different from classic liberals.

Yes, classic liberals believed in limited government, individual liberty, freedom of the press, and the like. That all started to change in America at the end of the 19th century with the rise of progressivism, which directly challenged the classic liberal tradition of the American founding, particularly the Constitution. Liberals started importing from Europe social democratic and socialist ideas.

Where do those European ideas come from? You say the 18th century brought us two Enlightenments?

The British, Anglo-American, and Scottish traditions, from John Locke and people like that, yielded a moderate Enlightenment, which became manifest in the Constitution and the American tradition. The radical Enlightenment—mainly French, from Pierre Bayle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—gave rise to the liberal tradition of the French Revolution.

You trace the French line to Holland and Baruch Spinoza’s rebellion in the 17th century against the Biblical understanding that God and nature are separate.

Spinoza believed that nature with a capital N was God and God was Nature: All one substance. “Monism” is the word he used, and he made nature absolute: If you discover what nature tells you to do, there’s no argument against it. French philosophers like Rousseau, inspired by Spinoza, developed the radical notion that you could discover the pure intention of nature, and then design a political order that reflected that good.

The “will of the people” would be absolute and uncontestable?

This is how Rousseau processed Spinoza: He took that idea of absolute freedom as derived from nature. He said we will design a civil government based upon that, and it will represent the general will of the people, which will be good because human beings are inherently good. I feel always a little uncomfortable when I take the next logical step and start to blame Rousseau, a philosopher, for the French Terror and the French Revolution.

Let’s blame him anyway.

Robespierre and others responsible for the French Terror took his ideas to their far logical conclusion. They were different from Locke or Jefferson or Madison, who worried about tyranny and didn’t believe in absolute freedom. They didn’t believe you could design a civil government that would capture all of the complexities of human existence. They put checks and balances in government.

So one side emphasizes what they see as man’s natural goodness; the other side accepts the ravages of original sin.

Jefferson was uncomfortable with “original sin.” He was not a coherent thinker about these things: He went back and forth between being a Francophile and a critic. Madison was a systematic thinker, as was Hamilton about this. They accepted the reality of original sin. They believed that human beings have selfish interests that need to be managed by government. The French believed they could create a government that reflected the natural goodness of man—and for those who disagreed there was the guillotine, because they were standing against goodness at that point.

‘Overall, we have a postmodern left that emphasizes moral relativism: We really can’t know the truth, so we make it up.’

Was the French Terror the logical conclusion of the French Revolution?

The French Terror was the extreme logical conclusion. Not everything about the French Revolution can be summed up by The Terror, but it did introduce into the Western liberal tradition the strange, contradictory idea of trying to enforce an idea of virtue. In the name of liberalism the French introduced illiberal methods. Those methods of revolutionary justice manifested themselves throughout Europe in the 19th century, and in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Every revolutionary movement on the globe today, including even radical religious extremists like those in ISIS, accepts those methods.

Alexis de Tocqueville comes to the United States in the 1830s well aware of the ravages of the French Revolution—and in America sees something very different.

Tocqueville, reacting to the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, feared governmental tyranny. The French associated religion with the feudal era, so revolutionaries wanted to destroy it. Tocqueville was surprised that in America religion was an ally of liberty, because religious pluralism worked very well with the American classic liberal tradition of keeping the government controlled and contained. Tocqueville saw how individuals had maximum freedom in their individual conscience and economic activities.

That amazed him.

Yes, in American civil society religion and liberty worked together. That was not the way it was in France, so he was struck by that difference.

Did he worry that democracy would become mobocracy?

Yes, 19th-century liberals saw democracy as popular demagoguery: People could get control of the government and support a dictator like Napoleon. But a marriage of civil society, religious liberty, and political and economic liberty, along with a constitutional order that provided for a divided government, kept this all in check.

Neither party wanted an imperial presidency?

In the late 19th century you still have both Democrats and Republicans committed to this classical understanding of checks and balances and wanting to keep the central government from becoming too powerful. In 1913, with Woodrow Wilson, you start seeing a growth of power in Washington.

Wilson didn’t want journalists to get in his way?

Progressives early in the 20th century didn’t care much about the First Amendment. Wilson during World War I suppressed freedom of the press. A new generation of radical progressives after the war brought back dissent, civil liberties, press freedom. The ACLU, invented in the 1920s, made freedom of expression a progressive idea—until that time it had not been.

Skipping to the 1960s—what happened then?

The new left introduced neo-Marxist ideas and cultural radicalism. That created a huge divide inside the progressive movement that lay dormant until the election of Barack Obama. On the one hand: social democracy, or socialism, which deals mainly with economics and income inequality—Bernie Sanders today. On the other hand: radical multiculturalism, represented in Hillary Clinton, a child of the 1960s. Overall, we have a postmodern left that emphasizes moral relativism: We really can’t know the truth, so we make it up.

The divide exists, but don’t cultural radicals use the state apparatus to force their views on others?

Progressives have given us this very large state that cultural radicals, multiculturalists, people involved in identity politics grab on to. They used the Supreme Court rather than the legislatures to overturn gay marriage bans. They use the apparatus invented by early 20th-century progressives for the benefit of movements and ideas for which those progressives would not have had any sympathy.

So Wilson pushed us toward big government but not “big love”?

We should not think that everything happening today with American liberalism is a logical conclusion of progressivism. Woodrow Wilson and other progressives believed in a big, centralized government, but they were culturally conservative for the most part. Today’s identity politics would be completely foreign to them.