How American liberalism lost its way and handed Trump a path to victory

Last December, as the dust was settling following Donald Trump’s victory, Barack Obama gave a speech – little noticed at the time and, so far as I can find, unreported in Australia – to the Chicago Democracy Forum, a think tank created under his auspices to advance liberal causes. (I use the word “liberal” here in the contemporary American sense, not the different, somewhat more conservative meaning it has in Australia.)

His topic was an idea which, these days, is seldom heard from progressives: the importance of pluralism.

Former Democrat presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and unsuccessful 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Photos: AP, BloombergCredit: Graphic by Aresna Villanueva

“In a democracy,” said Obama, “we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different from us.” And that, he argued, meant reaching beyond the liberal preoccupation with the rights of minorities; it extended to reaching out to, and seeking common ground with, people who did not share our beliefs.

“Pluralism does not require us to deny our unique identities or experiences, but it does require that we try to understand the identities and experience of others and to look for common ground ... Being open to the fact that even the folks we disagree with might have something ... that’s an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.”

It says something about how diseased American liberalism has become that an essentially commonplace plea for tolerance of those with different views should need to be made at all. Yet the vice of (American) liberalism in the 21st century is that, at the very time when it has become ever more strident in its demands for diversity, it has become increasingly intolerant.

As the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote last year in his memoir Chasing Hope: “Too often we are willing to embrace people who don’t look like us, but only if they think like us.” This was the point of Obama’s critique.

A button reading “Stop Woke Indoctrination” during Trump’s presidential inauguration in January.Credit: Bloomberg

Since Trump’s re-election, the opinion columns of newspapers and magazines (including this one) have overflowed with commentary about the attitudinal change his victory represented. It has been variously described as a cultural inflection point (Mark Zuckerberg), a shift in the zeitgeist (Toby Young), the death of woke (people too numerous to name, including Trump himself). In his address to Congress last week, Trump’s sarcastic references to “wokeness” were the lines that got the most enthusiastic applause.

The Trump phenomenon didn’t come out of nowhere. What does it tell us about the Democrats that they went backwards among every single disempowered demographic of which they considered themselves champions: blacks, Latinos, working-class men and women?

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.

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.