Liberalism and Liberal-Democracy

N.S. Lyons interviews Polish philosopher and politician Ryszard Legutko about Polish politics and liberal democracy. Asked about the difference between liberalism and progressivism, Legutko answers:

As I see it, liberalism – contrary to etymology – is not about freedom but about power and social engineering. I argued in my book that the liberals always assume a dominant position, claiming they know how to distribute freedom in the optimal proportions and, therefore, deserve to be the ultimate and irrevocable referees. This is an outrageous claim. They believe they are entitled to say that this group – for example, heterosexual men – has too much freedom, while that group – for instance, homosexual men – too little, etc., with the categorical implication that the proportion has to be changed through law, propaganda, and social pressure. The final aim of the liberal agenda is, therefore, not to have a free and open society but to have a society in which everything is subservient to liberal dogmas. Consequently, the existing rules and practices can always be suspended and restructured in accordance with the liberal criteria of redistribution. In other words, the liberals always assume what in the classical versions was called a state of nature, even if they do not use the term. All this dramatically changes our view of society. Existing restrictions automatically become suspect, especially if they come from tradition, institutions of long duration, established practices, and religion. Recently, even those restrictions coming from nature have been questioned. The people who defend all these restrictions must legitimize them before the liberal tribunal – which is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible – but this liberal tribunal does not need to legitimize itself. What has been happening with the laws regulating family, marriage, life and death, relations between men and women, education, etc., over the last decades is a case in point.

Liberalism is a version of progressivism: it perceives society as in the process of constant improvement (usually measured by the criterion of equality) and claims to possess the conceptual instruments that make such a change possible. Liberalism believes itself to be both the doer and the supervisor of progress. Like other progressives, the liberals have a strong sense of the enemy; that is, the more liberal the society becomes, the more formidable – they maintain – are the forces of illiberal and non-liberal enemies. This brings to one’s mind Generalissimo Stalin’s dictum that “with the growth of communism, the class struggle intensifies.” Today’s liberalism has already identified far more enemies and thought crimes than the communists did. The complete list is impossible to provide, but here is a sample: misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, eurocentrism, phallocentrism, logocentrism, ageism, binarism, populism, nationalism, xenophobia, hate speech, Euroscepticism, white supremacy, misgendering, etc.

You often in your book speak of “liberal democracy” as a hyphenated noun, taken as a single ideological system. That was around 2016. My own working hypothesis, however, is that much of the turmoil we are seeing in the West today is these two different things – liberalism and democracy – splitting apart as liberalism pursues its own ideological imperatives at the expense of democracy, casting it aside. And in response we see the emergence of “populism,” or what could be called a democratic reaction. What do you think? Do liberalism and democracy really naturally fuse with each other, or are they in fact antagonistic and potentially incompatible? Is a sustainable non-liberal democratic system conceivable? And if so do you think it would produce substantially different results from what we’re seeing in societies in the West today?

The problem is complex and difficult to disentangle. Yes, I mostly used “liberal democracy” to denote the currently existing political systems in the Western World, the systems which, despite different histories, have come to show remarkably similar totalitarian tendencies. Liberalism and democracy have different connotations but can each be inimical to freedom. How liberalism may threaten freedom I explained above. About the unpleasant consequences of democracy one can read in the final chapters of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In my book, I argued that the best system is what the Greeks called a mixed regime, a combination of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. Some argue – and I tend to agree – that the idea behind the U.S. Constitution was a mixed regime rather than a democracy. There are several areas where democratization has become extremely harmful – church, art, family, and education are obvious examples – all of them being by nature aristocratic rather than democratic domains. In other words, a well-organized society needs non-democratic institutions.

Democracy, as I understand it, is a system of procedures that secures a safe transition of power. It is not a system of ideas, an ideology, an article of faith, or a philosophical outlook, and should not become any of these. Excessive democratization leads to excessive politicization and a tendency to interpret everything in terms of a power struggle, like in a multiple-party system. The differences between the political parties are not intellectual because they are not usually resolved at a seminar through an exchange of arguments but at the ballot box, where one of the contestants acquires power and the legitimacy to use it within the existing rules. If we reduce intellectual and artistic differences to politics and partisanship – as it has been happening for some time now – then ultimately it is also political power, not truth or beauty, which settles every controversy.

The paradox is that it is in the area where democracy clearly supersedes all other systems – providing procedures that secure a safe transition of power – that we have seen a conspicuous departure from democratic mechanisms. Democracy came to be viewed as a term of identification or an act of faith, separated from democratic procedures. This has generated disgraceful political practices in which the European Union seems to be a pioneer and uncontested champion. In the name of democracy, one can violate the elementary procedures of democracy and present it as a higher form of democratic culture. For instance by excluding certain parties from the political system (as happens in the European Parliament) or preventing millions of voters from attaining any influence on politics by discrediting them as “populists.” The most recent example is, of course, the Polish case from which we started our conversation. All these horrendous practices are hailed as the victory of democrats over populists.