Liberal ideas won remarkable victories in the twentieth century. Liberal democracies outlasted fascism and Soviet communism, and the number of democracies grew sharply after 1989. Yet in recent decades liberalism has faced renewed challenges.
Pluralism and toleration
Modern societies contain people of many religions and none, with very different moral views. Rawls, in Political Liberalism (1993), called this the fact of reasonable pluralism: free people, reasoning in good faith, will come to different conclusions about the deepest questions. He argued that a liberal state should rest on an overlapping consensus, principles that people with different worldviews can each accept for their own reasons, rather than on any one religion or philosophy. Toleration, which began as a truce between churches, has become a general way of living with deep disagreement.
The end of history?
In 1989, as the Cold War ended, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay, later a book, arguing that liberal democracy might be the end point of humanity's search for the best form of government: no serious rival ideology remained. Since then, that confidence has given way to sharper questions.
Populism
One major challenge comes from populism, a style of politics, found on both the left and the right, that divides society into a virtuous “people” and a corrupt “elite”, and claims to speak for the people's true will. Populists often raise real grievances: economic insecurity, distant institutions, a sense that ordinary voters are ignored. Liberals worry that populism can become impatient with the things liberalism uses to limit power, such as independent courts, a free press and minority rights, since these can be cast as obstacles to the people's will. In 2014 Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán openly described his goal as building an illiberal state, and political scientists now debate illiberal democracy: governments that win elections but weaken the limits on power.
Supporters of populist movements reply that liberal elites have used courts, bureaucracies and international bodies to remove important questions from democratic control, and that restoring popular power is itself democratic.
Post-liberal critics
Some critics, often called post-liberals, argue that liberalism has failed on its own terms. The political theorist Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), argued that liberalism's very success, freeing individuals from family, place and tradition, has produced loneliness, inequality and distrust. Liberal defenders reply that these problems have many causes, and that the answer is to renew liberal institutions, not abandon them.
Debates over speech
Mill's questions about free speech are again at the center of public argument. How should social media platforms handle false or hateful content? Should laws ban hate speech, as many European countries do, or protect almost all speech, as the United States First Amendment largely does? How should universities balance open debate with an inclusive environment? People across the political spectrum accuse each other of censorship, and each side can appeal to liberal principles.
A related puzzle is what the philosopher Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance: if a society tolerates without limit even those who would destroy toleration, toleration may itself be destroyed. Popper himself thought intolerant views should normally be answered by argument, not suppressed, so long as their holders are willing to argue. Liberals disagree about where to draw that line, but most hold that the answer is usually more argument rather than suppression, except where speech becomes direct incitement, much as Mill held.
Thinking it through
Useful questions for any argument about liberalism: Which liberalism is meant, classical or egalitarian? Is the claim about principles or about how particular societies behave? Whatever you conclude, liberalism's central question, how free people who disagree can live together, will not go away.
Worked example: a platform's hard call
A large social media company must decide what to do about a post that claims, falsely, that a public vaccine causes a serious disease. The post is spreading quickly. What would different liberal principles suggest?
- Mill's fallibility argument warns against removing it: authorities have been wrong before, and suppression makes believers more suspicious. Better to answer it in the open.
- Mill's harm principle cuts the other way if the post causes people to refuse protection and spread disease to others. Is it more like a newspaper opinion or like a shout outside the corn dealer's house?
- A classical liberal might stress that the company is a private business, not a government, and should be free to set its own rules, while users are free to go elsewhere.
- A concern about concentrated power, which Montesquieu and Madison would recognize, asks whether a few companies should have so much control over public debate at all.
Possible responses include removing the post, labeling it with a correction, reducing how widely it spreads, or leaving it alone. Each has defenders who appeal to liberal values, and critics on both left and right who see bias in whatever is chosen.
The lesson is not that liberalism gives no answers. It is that liberal principles, liberty, equality, consent, limited power, can pull in different directions in a new setting. Thinking clearly means naming which principle you are relying on, and admitting what the alternative would protect that yours does not.