The crisis we’re going through now isn’t a struggle between right and left, but between illiberalism and liberalism, on both the right and the left.
It’s the latest battle in a war that has been going on for a very long time. It amounts to a struggle for control between two intolerant elites, each trying to exploit the rest of the population in service of its own self-serving worldview.
One illiberal worldview is an empire of will, tending towards fascism — domination by a strongman who supposedly embodies the spirit of the nation — and the other an empire of mind, tending towards communism — domination by a dictatorial government supposedly legitimized by a “science of history.”
Small-l liberals, whether on the left or the right, reject both forms of illiberalism in favor of a tolerant, inclusive worldview that allows for a wide range of opinions as long as they’re expressed nonviolently.
Illiberalism of either sort is intolerant and leads to violence as the only remaining resort when people refuse to agree with the “right answer,” whether that’s defined as the right-wing illiberal’s radical individualism or the left-wing illiberal’s radical collectivism.
For those of us on the liberal left fighting the intolerance of the right but puzzled by the intolerance we see in our own ranks, I think we need to recognize its history — and make a clean break with that history.
[Read more…] about A War of Elites: The Intolerant Right vs. the Intolerant Left