Who Abandoned Liberalism First, the Populists or the Establishment?

While American liberalism debates, round and round, whether Trumpism is a form of fascism, conservatives and conservatism’s fellow travelers have their own running debate about what exactly is happening to liberalism these days.

One form of this debate, the more familiar form, has focused on wokeness — what it is, whence it comes, is it quasi-religious or ideological or both, is it the fulfillment of liberalism or its betrayal, theories piling atop theories.

But there’s another debate that’s less about the content of liberal politics and more about its organizing structure. This argument relates to wokeness insofar as it tries to explain the pathways through which radical-seeming ideas spread so rapidly from academia through the worlds of philanthropy and education and corporate life. But it’s more interested in how the structure of liberal governance has changed, since the Cold War or Sept. 11 or the ascent of Barack Obama, than in the specific ideas that animate its operations.

The shift that these right-leaning observers are trying to explain is a phenomenon that became particularly apparent in the Trump years and especially in the Covid-19 emergency — the seeming integration of all sorts of institutions, public and private, academic and governmental, in a common political-ideological front.

Think of the way an idea would seem to travel from progressive academia through the world of foundations and nongovernmental organizations, popping up in the policies of a Democratic administration and the language of corporate human resources departments alike, without ever being subject to a normal kind of democratic debate. Or think of the various Covid-era entanglements between activist groups, social media companies, legislators and public health officials, and the related emergence of the liberal censor or commissar as a character across a range of very different institutional spheres — from anti-disinformation activists making demands of social media giants to sensitivity readers screening novels to bureaucrats assessing the D.E.I. statements of applicants for academic jobs.

Two essays from the past year are helpful for understanding the right’s perspective on these phenomena. One of them, by Jacob Siegel for Tablet, focuses on a theory of liberal politics distilled by the term “whole of society,” popularized in the Obama era and recycled thereafter. Here’s a bland gloss on the term, from a handbook of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development:

Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.

Here is Siegel’s harsher reading of what this formulation means in practice:

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, N.G.O.s and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

Siegel argues that this approach originated with the war on terror and now applies mechanisms of surveillance and institutional coordination originally intended for countering terrorist extremism to a much wider range of perceived dangers — most of them populist and right-wing (like the trucker protesters in Canada having their bank accounts frozen by Justin Trudeau’s government, say), though under certain circumstances a left-wing group might face cancellation or surveillance as well.

Here Siegel’s argument connects to the other essay, by Nathan Pinkoski for First Things, which argues that after the end of the Cold War and beginning with the administration of Bill Clinton, it was the supposed stewards of the liberal order who first moved in the “postliberal” direction, with right-wing forms of postliberalism trailing behind.

The essence of the initial postliberal movement, in Pinkoski’s view, is the abandonment of the “essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction,” in favor of a model of politics in which the state acts in a concert with an ever-widening array of nongovernmental partners, philanthropic and academic and corporate and financial, who have more freedom of action because they aren’t bound by the traditional liberal limits on state power.

So for instance, in foreign and economic policy the postliberal shift has involved an increasing role for “publicly mandated, privately imposed sanctions,” in which banks and corporations and financial institutions are expected to put aside neutrality and help the United States government isolate terrorist organizations and rogue governments and eventually major powers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This geopolitical expectation has then blurred naturally into related expectations about corporate social responsibility, the idea that “environmental, social and governance,” or E.S.G., norms should guide investing — norms that are themselves defined in hazy interactions between state institutions, activists, foundations and the like.

Meanwhile (this would be my own account, extending Pinkoski’s point) a similar postliberal haze has fallen over domestic cultural and political debates, such that by the time the Trump era arrived it could be hard to determine exactly where the actual points of political decision were in various hot-button debates.

Consider the debate over transgender rights and youth transitioning. Are the key actors the activists demanding a specific line on transgender rights? Or the medical associations charged with establishing best practices for transgender care — standards that were clearly influenced by the activists? Or the social media companies policing their users for transphobia — which seemed reliant on the activists and medical associations to define what counts as acceptable debate? Or the liberal politicians who supported all these movements with very general forms of legislation, like the Equality Act, whose exact intended effects were not always entirely clear?

If you ask, “Who is actually setting policy here?” the answers can be extremely hard to pin down. And both Pinkoski and Siegel would suggest that’s the point of a whole-of-society postliberalism (if I may fuse their language), that by design it insulates would-be reformers and change agents from normal forms of democratic accountability.

And, indeed, it enables them to resist democratic outcomes when those outcomes seem to represent a far-right danger from within — whether through the kinds of civic-mobilization efforts that have sought to quarantine right-wing populist parties in Europe or the Resistance movement (a fascinating blend of outside protest, lawfare and internal bureaucratic opposition) that greeted the first Trump administration in the United States.

This makes it especially interesting to read Pinkoski and Siegel in parallel with arguments valorizing those kinds of Resistance efforts — like a recent essay in our pages by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard, offering advice to would-be resisters of a potential second Trump administration and urging the mobilization of “influential groups and societal leaders,” such as “chief executives, religious leaders, labor leaders and prominent retired public officials,” against a Trumpian victory or subsequent authoritarian overreach. A whole-of-society movement, if you will.

To Levitsky and Ziblatt, this kind of movement is potentially the last bulwark of liberalism, and it hasn’t taken shape adequately in Trump-era America as yet. To Pinkoski and Siegel, it has taken shape so thoroughly as to represent — or at least threaten — a potential new post-liberal kind of regime altogether.

You can’t force these competing diagnoses to align, but here is a possible third reading of the story. First, a public-private alignment under left-of-center auspices has definitely been a key feature of post-Cold War politics, and the alignment has become more complete under Trump and especially in the Covid era than Levitsky and Ziblatt quite acknowledge, appearing briefly as something like the kind of new managerial regime that Pinkoski and Siegel critique.

But second, the trends since then, both globally and domestically, suggest that a whole-of-society politics is extremely hard to sustain except under unusual emergency circumstances. Its comprehensive demands generate too many potential loci of resistance; its alignments fracture internally under all kinds of different pressures; and there’s constant incentives for ambitious figures to defect internally (see Musk, Elon) and for outside forces to challenge its attempt at comprehensive rule.

This implies that as we contemplate the next phase of this strange era, liberals probably shouldn’t put too much hope in some still-more-comprehensive anti-Trump mobilization, because it already happened the day before yesterday, it didn’t achieve the full victory, and today the whole-of-society response to populism may have already passed its peak.

By the same token, conservatives shouldn’t look at the trends and tendencies that Pinkoski and Siegel identify and automatically extrapolate them forward toward some kind of soft totalitarianism. Sometimes you recognize the new order fully only once it’s already begun to fragment or dissolve; sometimes — often — the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.