Does Liberal Democracy End Next Week?

Yes, our tribalist hysteria sucks. But don’t count liberalism out just yet.

A woman argues with a far-right protester during a rally near the downtown of Stone Mountain, Georgia on August 15, 2020. (Lynsey Weatherspoon/Getty Images)

Is this our first post-liberal election?

Maybe I should unpack that question a bit more. By liberal, I don’t mean left-wing — or right-wing for that matter. I mean a system in which we are committed to living peacefully with others who differ from us, sometimes profoundly. I mean abiding by the same democratic rules to reach compromises, a system where we win some and lose some, and each election season, we lick our wounds or stroke our whiskers, and prepare for the next contest. I mean, in a word, pluralism. This is the essence of liberal democracy; we are Lockean advocates and opponents of various causes and politicians; we are not Schmittian friends and enemies. And no issue is ever settled for good.

This vision of politics held firm for much of my lifetime, even as Western democracies went through convulsions. It’s deeply underrated. It got us through the 1960s tumult, the Cold War, the Islamist terror wave, and the first wave of “political correctness.” But as the economy inexorably and relentlessly split the country in two new classes (the college educated and not), and as ever-more experiments in living emerged to compete with the old, liberal democracy began to fray, as the ancient philosophers predicted. A surplus of elites and a boredom bred of nihilism made things worse.

From the 1990s onward, the Gingrich Republicans increasingly refused to accept the legitimacy of Democratic presidents, and then, under Trump, refused to accept the legitimacy of the elections themselves. The intellectual right flirted first with ridding the world of tyranny alongside with fundamentalist certainty; in the wake of that catastrophe, they went more recently with Thomist “integralism” and caudillo-style populism. Live-and-let-live ethics ceded to Christianism and then Christian Nationalism, and even a half-assed insurrection to overthrow an election.

And among Democrats, a new puritanical zeal emerged to stamp out the original American sin of slavery through an “anti-racist” Kulturkampf — by re-educating children and indoctrinating adults in a new era of “social justice.” In this new woke world, toleration was another word for oppression, and silence equaled violence. The universities became madrassas, the newspapers turned into tracts — abandoning reporting for narratives based in the idea of America as a permanent White supremacy. Dissenters were ostracized or fired. No neutral zone was allowed; and no private space was permitted to exclude the public orthodoxy.

Trump of course catalyzed both illiberalisms, and made them more suffocating. He holds the truth and the rule of law in contempt when applied to him — and that corrosion spread. He abides no principle but obedience to him and to his ego. He has made the right more radical and turned the left into a manic, emotionally incontinent mess. Biden’s promise in 2020 to be a calmer and unifier evaporated almost immediately, as soon as he entered office, as he embraced industrial policy and massive spending, and replaced equality with equity, color-blindness with “anti-racism”, and sex with gender.

The calm, the skepticism, the toleration, the epistemic humility, and the moderation that make a liberal democracy possible seemed to vanish into thin air.

Critically, the oldest and greatest cultural bulwark of liberalism — Christianity — also collapsed. The deep belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God and all equally flawed and forgivable gave way to a fundamentalist hubris on the right that saw liberals not as citizens who were misguided but as enemies who had to be destroyed. And on the left, Trump supporters soon became viewed as alien, anathema, unfathomable, deplorable — bigots for whom forgiveness was unthinkable.

That’s why we’re so on edge right now. For the two tribes, this has come to seem existential. If Harris wins, the right fears ever-more cultural onslaught, persecution, lawfare, and media gaslighting. If Trump wins, the left fears an end to the rule of law and the birth of a fascist regime — complete with camps, tanks, and an unquestionable leader. It feels less like an election than the eve of a final battle.

But is it? As someone who has seen our polity through this lens for some time, I’m now asking myself if I may have overstated the case. We will find out in the next few days and weeks if our worst fears materialize of a liberal democracy come undone. But here are some brief, unusually optimistic, thoughts ahead of the abyss in front of us.

Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is at the time. Yes, our discourse is horrid and made worse by social media. Yes, in the abstract, we have come to hate and fear one another. But in practice, in real life, I haven’t witnessed social collapse. Yes, things get a bit edgy. Yes, it’s hard to be a moderate in an evangelical church, or a liberal in a leftist corporation. But this is not 1968, as we saw this August in Chicago. American easy-going pragmatism still endures in both red and blue America. We feared American fascism in 2016. It didn’t arrive. The system survived one Trump term. It may well another.

Our 50-50 divide also helps in a way: it makes the red-blue gulf nerve-wracking — but it also effectively bars a huge victory for either side any time soon. We are more likely to continue gridlocked than descend into a civil war. Compared with any other developed nation, we’re also booming economically, despite our mutual loathing, innovating away, and still a cultural global hub. We’re not Weimar Germany — a new democracy wracked by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, and wounded national pride. We are the oldest democracy in the world.

Federalism and the First Amendment are also the safety valves bequeathed us by our Founders. Some questions — like abortion — really are hard to compromise on, but forcing one side’s settlement on everyone (Roe) is the illiberal move. So in some ways, Dobbs has actually made liberalism easier, not harder. It allows for different legal regimes — and experience of them.

The First Amendment has also saved us from the illiberalism of the woke left. Just think of what has happened to free speech in Canada and Britain without it. Yes, the woke captured every institution, but they failed to censor online media (thanks, Elon!), and could not prevent the rise of an alternative media universe to push back against orthodoxy. For every NPR bore, there arrived a Rogan; for every WaPo narrative, a singular Substack voice; for every red guard “fact-checker” in legacy media, there’s a “community notes”.

And we are tolerating each other. Just about. Sure, pro-choice states may offer sanctuary to women seeking abortions in pro-life states — but that’s hardly civil war. And the most extreme woke attempts at a cultural revolution — the bid to end the reality of biological sex, for example — eventually reveal themselves as forms of insanity and cruelty, and fail. Even so, you can now move to Minnesota and have your child’s sex reassigned before puberty; and you can also move to a state where boys are not at risk of being chemically castrated because they act like girls.

There are, of course, many more emotionally satisfying forms of government than liberalism. Ibram X Kendi would love to live in a country where an unaccountable “anti-racist” department could intervene anywhere at any time to right an injustice, however trivial, in the great racial revanchism of the 21st Century. But he won’t get to. Half the country would resist; heck, even NYT liberals have begun to see crude DEI as counter-productive racist poison. And critical race theory hasn’t destroyed the Constitution yet.

Equally, Matt Walsh would love to live in a country where gay couples have no right to marry, women have no right to abortion at all, and divorce is much, much harder. Well, good luck with that, Matt! Adrian Vermeule can thrill to the thought of an integralist Supreme Court bringing natural law back with teeth. But that’s not gonna happen either. Even this outlier Court is unlikely to undo marriage equality, because a big majority — across red and blue America — favor it. We can get a modus vivendi on some things, after all. And we have.

Liberalism wins not because it is better; but because every other option is worse. And as we fret about this election and its aftermath, that’s worth remembering. Liberal democracy is under threat, and we should be vigilant in protecting it. But there’s a reason the liberal settlement has lasted, however ragged. You declare liberalism over … and then realize you’ve got nothing credible or unifying to replace it with.

So we enter a holding pattern in a turbulent atmosphere. There will be some sudden bumps and lurches, but the physics of the Constitution can hold us aloft. We can even harbor a decent hope that our tattered liberal democracy can stay on life support if we keep our nerve, lower the temperature, and begin to accept the permanence and legitimacy of the other side.

And even, eventually, their humanity.

New On The Dishcast: Musa al-Gharbi

Musa is a sociologist and writer. He’s an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His first book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. He also has a great substack, “Symbolic Capital(ism).”

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how “elite overproduction” fuels wokeness, and the myth of Trump’s support from white voters. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Sam Harris and Tina Brown. We also run more reader dissents on the trans issue and a final batch of Harris-Trump debate before Election Day.

A “Normal Gay Guy” Checks In

It strikes me as quite remarkable that, this week, JD Vance on Rogan aired a real and fascinating divide in the gay and lesbian world over politics — that hasn’t begun to see the light of day in the activist-controlled legacy media.

The official legacy media line is that there is a single, unanimous “LGBTQ+” community, that every one of us supports indoctrinating children in the core ideas of critical queer and gender theory from kindergarten on and transing those kids who say they are the opposite sex, after a mere couple of hours of therapy, even before they have gone through puberty.

All of this, of course, is a lie. Exit polls, for example, showed that roughly a third of gay men and lesbians voted for Trump in 2020. And despite transqueer bullying, many gay men and lesbians see in gender-dysphoric children their own pasts, and are deeply worried that even more gay and lesbian kids could be transitioned in error, and have their bodies wrecked for life.

This is what Vance described as the “normal gay guy” vote. For those appalled at the very idea of such a thing (there is of course massive pressure within left gay culture to demonize anything faintly “normal”), let me proffer a simple definition: a “normal gay guy” is a man solely attracted to biological men, who doesn’t wish to be a female, who believes in the sex binary, whose politics is rooted in something other than tribal victimology, and who does not identify as “queer”. I’d say, outside the woke “transqueer” bubbles, it’s a clear majority. Good luck finding any coverage of us outside Rogan and the web.

And, yes, many of us see “gender-affirming care” as what Vance called it: “pharmaceutical conversion therapy” for gay and lesbian children. That is, in fact, an inspired definition. We want to stop it. And we can’t believe our own organizations are in the vanguard of imposing it.

Money Quotes For The Week

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct. Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran,” – JD Vance.

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” – Joe Biden on Trump voters.

“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death,” – Liz Cheney. I’m sorry, but Trump was obviously making the “chickenhawk” point against neocons like her. He wasn’t threatening her with death.

“She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them,” – Sid Rosenberg, speaker at Trump’s rally at MSG.

“Mostly I’d like to know which flavor of mental illness we’ll be dealing with for four years already. The suspense is killing me,” – Antonio García Martínez.

“She was always interested in race and gender. We all knew it was really important to her, so we would proactively add that to her briefings. She didn’t have to ask for it,” – an anonymous Harris staffer on her “equity” obsession as veep.

“If [migrants] committed a crime, deport them. No questions asked, they’re gone,” – Hillary Clinton campaigning in 2008.

“I would like to suggest that we put in a bill, if you burn the American flag, one year in jail,” – Donald Trump reminding us of his stance on free speech.

Yglesias Award Nominees

“If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side. If you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave,” – Van Jones.

“Last time I was on TV with Ryan Girdusky, he said I don’t care about victims of migrant crime and I told him to go fuck himself. It was spicy! That said, I have a hard time understanding why Mehdi Hasan — a bad faith debater if ever there was one — gets to insinuate that everyone he disagrees with is a Nazi, but a (tasteless, to be clear) joke about him supporting terrorism is beyond the pale,” – Robby Soave on CNN banning Girdusky.

The View From Your Window

Las Vegas, Nevada, 1.36 pm

Dissents Of The Week: With Endorsers Like These …

A reader writes:

I’ve been a reader for over a year now, and I appreciate your common-sense approach to the state of things. But I’m sad to see that the Dish has been ever-more critical of Harris, and not of Trump. While I’m not a Harris fan and share your criticisms of her and her campaign, it’s crystal clear that the barn is undeniably ablaze over on the Trump side. I’m not sure what you’re accomplishing by continuing to increasingly harp on Harris’ issues, while letting the markedly more troubling ones with Trump skate by unobserved. Sure, the MSM is covering that, but it’s also important for non-MSM to cover how unhinged Trump has become, even by his standards.

One problem is that on many core issues — mass immigration, wokeness, free speech — I’m closer to Trump than Harris. If Vance were the nominee, I’d vote for him. But Trump remains an intolerable risk to our entire system.

Another writes, “I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen someone in journalism — or even on the street — speak so negatively about the person they are casting their vote for.” Sure. But you want me to lie? I truly can’t stand Harris and think she’d be a terrible president. Doesn’t that make my vote for her worth more? Or am I supposed to pretend I like it?

Here’s another reader on my “so-called endorsement of Harris”:

Take a look at Liz Cheney and see how an endorsement by a conservative who understands what is at stake in this election is properly done. Cheney does not spend hours critiquing the person she is endorsing to make herself feel better, agonizing publicly over what a trauma it is for her to take such a step. She simply states the obvious: that Harris is the far superior candidate at the most basic level of preserving democracy and the rule of law in the US, forcefully rebuts Trump and his insurrection, and argues for Harris. That is how an endorsement not focussed on the endorser — but rather the endorsee — works. Really, get over yourself.

I’m a writer, not another politician. I’m allowed to agonize. And I think Cheney’s total surety is a bit too easy for a conservative. Another dissent:

So it’s a problem when Harris is “avoiding substantive messaging on key issues” (which her people seem to think is a strategy)? Well, it’s working great for Trump.  We still don’t know, for example, how he would cover eliminating taxes on tips. We don’t know how SHE would cover eliminating those taxes, but Trump “handing out McDonald’s meals as a friendly grandpa” is a genius PR move?

Not that I want to give Van Jones or anyone at CNN any credit, but Jones said regarding Trump vs. Harris: “He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless.” Clearly Harris is not gonna be flawless by my standards, certainly not yours. And the “lawless” part is because people like you are still treating this as a popularity contest when we are dealing with fundamentally different concepts of what government is supposed to be. One of the nominees is intrinsically opposed to the American way, and that is not what the media is emphasizing enough.

I do think that Trump’s ads hammering Harris on letting trans prisoners get surgery at public expense is effective, but between letting trans people get taxpayer-funded surgery and sending migrants to concentration camps, I know what I’d pick. And don’t dodge by saying Trump didn’t do that in the first term. That’s because he had people like John Kelly and even Bill Barr working with him. They won’t be there next time.

I don’t think Harris needs to be “flawless”. But I’m allowed to criticize — and don’t like being told to shut up and vote for a candidate who has offered nothing substantive to those of us on the center-right.

One more dissent for now:

It was odd to read your latest critique of the Harris campaign in the same Dish as your link to Yglesias’ case for Harris, because they come to strikingly different conclusions from the same core data. You call Harris a mediocre candidate, while Yglesias calls her a replacement-level Democrat. That is basically making the same observation with a significantly different spin. He believes this is a reason to vote for her, while you use it as a reason to disparage her. An average, normie, Democratic candidate is actually a pretty high bar, since we are pulling from an elite pool here.

She is probably doing the absolute best with a bad situation. What you want is a world-class candidate — another Obama or Reagan. It’s possible one exists, and if Biden had stepped down and allowed a normal primary, one may have emerged. But he didn’t. And really the only viable candidate given the timing was his vice president.

Many more dissents are over on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

An oldie but goodie. A real insult-comic does it to voters’ faces, not behind a podium:

In The ‘Stacks

• Damon Linker can’t believe the MSM “ignored the most obvious historical antecedent” to the MSG rally.
• Could a joke decide the election? Could Rogan?
• Josh Barro makes the case against newspaper endorsements. Greenwald talks about the Bezos decision and free speech.
• Both nominees ignored the working class in the closing days of the election.
• Are we headed toward four years of “temporary hardship”?
• A great debate between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro defending each nominee.
• A final reminder that electing Trump will make wokeness worse.
• Anti-migrant backlash in Europe is not correlated with racism.
• Daniel Larison keeps an eye on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
• Richard Reeves shows that “no, men’s views on policy haven’t really changed.”
• Ruy Teixeira has an autopsy of 21st Century progressivism.
• An obit for virtual reality.
• Megan Gafford meditates on the dangers of gamification.
• Luke Hallam addresses the question of why Elon has gone “full conspiracist.”
• The case for bringing back “retard”.
• A short history of Halloween candy.
• My old friend Niall Ferguson launches his own Tardis, er, substack — huzzah!
• Ayaan creates her own platform, Courage Media. Congrats!

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? (The cartoon beagle is hiding a key sign.) Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.

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