Liberal Values are Facing Biggest Threat Since the 1930s, Says Author

WALTER ISAACSON: Adrian Wooldridge, welcome to the show. 

 

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE: Thank you.

 

ISAACSON: Your book, “The Revolutionary Center” is a defense of liberalism. Liberalism though has two meanings here in the United States. It’s generally like classical liberalism based on the rights of the individual stemming from John Locke and others, I’d say. And then there’s liberalism in a political sense, which tends to imply big state, big government spending programs. Tell me what you mean by liberalism and why do we have two different definitions of it?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: I would say that the core meaning of liberalism is three things. One is individualism. It’s a political philosophy that starts with the individual and works upwards and outwards. You are always as a liberal, concern with the rights duties and self-development of the individual. Secondly, it’s a belief that starts with that notion of tolerance. We must be tolerant of other people’s opinions, and the only way to come to the truth or to eliminate error at the very least, is through open debate. And tolerance assumes also a society with plural values, pluralism, different people living in different ways. And the third thing is skepticism about power. Saying that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And because it’s this dangerous drug, you need to divide it and limit it and to enumerate rights and things like that. Those are the three essential things about liberalism.

 

The issue of whether you have a big state or a small state are secondary things. You can be a liberal and support a big state. You can be a liberal and support a small state. Keynes was a liberal, wanted a bigger state. Hayek was a liberal, wanted a smaller state. Those are secondary things. I’m saying that the three essential things are tolerance, skepticism about power, and a commitment to individualism. And I think in the 1990s, we became obsessed with arguments about the size of the state. And you got people who wanted big states saying the other people were reactionists and people who wanted small states saying the other people were false liberals. And that was a bit of a deception about what was going on. And I think we were able to have that deception, that confusion in the 1990s, because we were all basically liberals. Everybody agreed about the three big things that I was talking about. That was the era of liberal triumphalism and an era in which we could become –

 

ISAACSON: Well, let me put a pit on that. You think that President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher were liberals in that sense, just as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were. 

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Absolutely. 

 

ISAACSON: Explain that.

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Yeah, absolutely. George W. Bush. But, you know, there was a big argument about the size of the state, and Thatcher was on one side, to some extent Clinton and Blair were on the other side. But they all basically agreed in liberal values. Now we’re in a different world. We’re in a world in which you have autocrats on the march who don’t believe in individualism, who don’t believe in separating powers, who don’t believe in tolerance. Putin, Xi and the rest of it, you know, the biggest economy in the world by some measures is dominate– you know, is an autocratic power. You have Trump in the White House who I think doesn’t agree with a lot of things that George W. Bush or George HW Bush would’ve thought were absolutely essential. So I think we have to stop focusing on the secondary debate about the size of the state. And all of us as liberals, whether we’re big state liberals or small state liberals, have to agree there are certain fundamental values that we have to agree to defend. And those values are under attack more now than they have been at any point since the 1930s.

 

ISAACSON: Well, you say it’s a secondary issue whether you have a really big state or a small state, but that seems connected to liberalism, a very big state with doing a whole lot, taxing a whole lot would in some ways seem to be counter to basic liberalism. Is that right?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: No, I don’t think so. I think that you can have – the argument for the big state can be a liberal argument. If you say you need a bigger state in order to give people the quality of opportunity – in order to give them the conditions in which they can develop their individual characters, personalities, in which you intervene when people are, need pensions or need social assistance – if you are doing that to give them a quality of opportunity to give them the capacity to develop themselves as individuals. I don’t think that’s necessarily illiberal. Now, there are people who believe in the big state who are illiberal because they want to have collectivist values imposed on society because they want society to march together as a single disciplined unit. I mean, Xi believes in the big state, he’s anti-liberal. Putin believes in the big state, he’s anti-liberal. But I think, you know, Lyndon Johnson was perfectly reasonable and liberal. Bill Clinton, you know, was a liberal. Barack Obama was a liberal because they were doing these things to emancipate the individual and to allow the individual to achieve their destiny. So –

 

ISAACSON: What about the democratic socialists that are arising in the Democratic Party?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Absolutely not liberals. I think it made – in my mind. I think there are two big threats to liberalism at the moment. One comes from the right which believes in power and believes in putting people into certain categories. But the other comes from the left. And that is because there are people on the left who are obsessed with racial, gender, biological categories who say that you were born into a certain role in life because of who you are, and that you cannot transcend that through self-help, self-development and the rest of it. So I think in some ways there are similarities between the threats on the left and threats on the right, because they’re both, in their fundamental conception of society and the responsibilities of the state, anti-individualist rather than individualist.

 

ISAACSON: And you say that in the book. You say that the progressive left is as illiberal as the Trumpian right. But look it seems like a bit of a false equivalence, but push back if I’m wrong. I mean, are overzealous college professors who kind of push back a bit on speech, are they the same as a president who’s refusing to accept the results of an election?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Well, I think you have a very good point there. I wrote this before the current Trump administration, I should have taken to look at more the results of the election. I think in the first Trump term, we had a president who is in some way constrained until the very end when he tried to overturn the results of an election. In the second Trump term, we have a much more aggressive self-confident, full-Trump, sort of Trump. And I think that he has overstepped the mark on more and more and more occasions. So I do think there is a bigger threat from the right than from overzealous college professors. 

 

However, I do think if you’re a college professor or a college student if you’re in that sort of environment, you should be doubly sensitive to the importance of debate, tolerance, a free exchange of views. And to shout people down in a learning environment is extremely destructive and dangerous. And that’s the end of the beginning. If those people get power, they’re more likely, if they start off from a position of intolerance, to become yet more intolerance if they have power. So the logical conclusion of an identitarian left is almost the same as the logical conclusion of an identitarian right. But, you know, Trump’s never pretended to be a liberal. I mean, these people would claim to be liberals and they’re acting in an illiberal fashion.

 

ISAACSON: Do you think the identitarian left, as you just called it, or for that matter, self-indulgent liberalism, as you say, happened in the 90s and the early 2000s. Did that pave the way for Trump? And if so, how?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Absolutely. I think something happened in the 1980s and 1990s that prepared the way for the general crisis of liberalism, which led to Trump. And that thing was that we abandoned the public square. We abandoned the notion of a world in which you have duties and constraints as well as freedom. And we had this sort of strange marriage of two sorts of liberalism. One was the liberalism of the 1960s, which says, you know, do your own thing, let it all hang out. That there are no, there are no rules. The permissive society. And the second was the liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan, which says that the markets business should all be dominant. And that’s pushed away a whole set of constraints, constraints on the way that capitalism operates, and constraints on the way that individuals tend to conduct themselves and tend to operate.

 

And I think that double liberalism did an enormous amount of good for a while. You know, it created great marriage. It got rid of all sorts of overmighty state run companies, particularly in Britain, that ran things very badly. It, you know, it gave the economy a burst. But I think the full consequences of that became much more dangerous in two ways. One, that it removed the notion of, you know, the public good, of public constraints on things. And secondly that it’s empowered a rather self-seeking form of capitalism. So you had a society in which everybody was maximizing their utility. We were saying things like, we musn’t have any borders. We musn’t have any immigration controls. We must just let the market decide, individuals decide according to their own consciences. And I think that sort of society that both those revolutions did ultimately lead to Trump. And in some ways, Trump as this sort of rather libertine businessman, is the sort of embodiment of both those revolutions.

 

ISAACSON: You say part of the liberal revolution of the 1990s was allowing more open borders and free immigration, which seems to be a tenant in some ways. Free movement of people should be a tenant of liberalism. And there was something in your book, I’m gonna read it to you ’cause it was so tough in what you say: “Sweden suffers from the highest rate of death by shooting in Europe, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The British northern cities that powered the industrial revolution are plagued in their ethnic enclave by cousin marriage, honour punishment, and grooming gangs.” And that was the result of all these immigration policies, you say. Don’t liberal immigration policies – isn’t that at the heart of tolerance or diversity that a liberal should believe in?

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Well, what I argue in my book is that liberalism should be capable of inventing itself and changing itself when the world changes. As Cain says, you know, when it starts raining, I put up my umbrella. And I think that in the 1990s, the 2000s, there was a common consensus amongst liberals, and I was certainly one of those people, who said that immigration could only be good. Good economically because you’ve got more labor, but good culturally because it led to more and more pluralism of values, lifestyles and things like that. And also, it was a liberal thing to do. And I think that what’s happening now is that the biggest threat to liberalism is coming from the public reaction to very high levels of immigration. And that those high levels of immigration have sometimes led to very good things, but not always led to very good things.

 

We have a problem of assimilation in the United Kingdom. We have a – in Sweden, they have a massive problem of gang violence, which is mainly from ethnic minority communities. And what you get, if you get a sense that society is spinning out of control by over liberal policies, over progressive policies, is that you get Trumpism or you get Faragism or you get in in Sweden, you know, the Sweden Democrats part of who were originally a neo-Nazi party, a part of a part of government. So there’s a practical argument that we need to have firmer control of our borders in order to prevent the bad guys from getting in. But there’s also a bigger argument than that. And that is that society isn’t just a collection of atomized individuals pursuing their interests. So you, it’s illogical to have immigration controls. It is also that we need to have certain common values to organize around. So I think that liberalism went a bit too far in one particular free market, free morals direction. And we need to save liberalism by moving it a bit more towards a more restraint, more restraint on the market, and particularly with tech, and also more sense of responsibility not just individuals doing their own thing.

 

ISAACSON: Let me take you back in history. Because more than a hundred years ago, we were in a period very much like this one with huge technological change, probably greater than the tech change we have now, meaning we got electricity and light bulbs and automobiles and radio and telephones. And it led to disparities of great wealth. It led to robber barons. It also led liberalism to reinvent itself. Tell me how liberalism reinvented itself in the early 1900s and what lessons there are for today.

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Yeah, this is absolutely central to the argument of my book because I think we are living through, in many ways, a similar period. Now this in the middle and late 19th century liberalism was a belief essentially in the free market, in the supremacy of the individual in market transactions. And something that was very skeptical about the state. The state intervention was something that was basically regarded as very bad. And you’ve got a lot of liberals in both Britain and the United States, Grover Cleveland or Gladstone towards the end of his career who cleaved very strongly to that idea. They hated the notion of state intervention. But other liberals say, well, if we are going to cleave to this doctrine, we may well be on the wrong side of history, because what we are getting is the rise of democracy.

 

America had a democracy at that period, slightly limited, but democracy, Britain really didn’t, what we’re seeing is we’re getting the rise of great big, massive industries. So it is not just a free market transaction. These corporations are huge entities. And we have all the problems of industrialization in terms of sewage and lack of chaotic infrastructure in the streets. So they said, in order to save capitalism, but also in order to save liberalism, a society based on the individual, we need a more active state. Roosevelt was very, I mean Teddy Roosevelt was very interesting here because he said that in order to save the individual, particularly upper class individuals, from corruption, you need to stop them being so inheriting vast fortunes. You need to make sure that they’re fit for the battle of the battle of life as he saw it.

 

But he also said more fundamentally that if you get giant corporations that control the economy you’re not, you haven’t really got free markets, you haven’t really got open competition. So who’s a supporter of antitrust and one of the first people to embrace antitrust in that way. You had in Britain the invention of the prototype of the welfare state, free education in schools, free milk, some sort of pension provision, a more active role for the state with a group of people called the New Liberals in Great Britain. And all of this was predicated on the idea that the only way that individuals could flourish in a mass society dominated by big corporations, was for the state to take a more active role. And I think a lot of those problems are being re-presented to us by the current digital revolution. And a lot of the solutions also require us to be more active in relation to the state. 

 

In the 1980s, 1990s, liberalism became a doctrine that said the market is good, and basically business is good. We should give business its druthers, allow it to do what it wants. That’s still the ruling ideology of a lot of people, a lot of centrist democrats, I would say would say that. But I would say that we need to be much more active in dealing with the big tech companies than that neoliberal orthodoxy would allow us to be for two reasons. One is that they’ve just got too much power. That Lord Acton’s formulation, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is a warning about the private sector as well as about the public sector, but also that what they are selling us and the way that they’re selling us things leads to addiction, distraction, destroys habits of concentration, habits of self-control that are really fundamentally threatening to the essence of a liberal society. And the essence of a liberal society is a self-controlled, self-conscious, I hope, morally virtuous individual.

 

ISAACSON: Adrian Wooldridge, thank you so much for joining us.

 

WOOLDRIDGE: Thank you.