Sunstein is right: there are indeed racist liberals
Another look at the inbox.
From the inbox:
Carl - I saw you post that Cass Sunstein’s definition of liberalism was much more defensible than Matt McManus’s. Can you explain this?
Just to clarify, this question was asked in the context of Isaac Chotiner’s recent interview with Sunstein about liberalism. And the answer is yes, though I think the most useful thing would be to explain my own conception of liberalism and talk about how it differs from their. In my view it is really quite simple:
Liberalism calls for expanding human freedom through the defense of a set of universal rights that belong to every individual, which have historically included the right to free expression, to vote in democratic elections, and to private property.
That’s it. People love to overcomplicate this definition in all kinds of convoluted ways, but for all intents and purposes the definition of liberalism that everyone learns in grade school still works perfectly well. Liberalism is a politics that emerged in opposition to feudalism and its regime of aristocratic (rather than universal) rights, its religious censoriousness, its monarchy, and its property arrangements. Liberalism’s chief rival, socialism, specifically challenges its institution of private property, and (in some traditions) its regime of bourgeois rights. Feudalism and socialism bookend liberalism, which is defined by its contrast with the two.
The conception of liberalism that Sunstein lays out in his interview with Chotiner has provoked an enormous online backlash, largely by liberals who are outraged by how many conservatives he counts as liberals. A passage about Friedrich Hayek is exemplary. Sunstein takes the fairly conventional stance that Hayek was a liberal, and Chotiner challenges him on two grounds. First, Chotiner points out some unambiguously racist quotes from Hayek, which elicits this response from Sunstein:
I didn’t know about that. Wow. Hayek was a very complicated figure. He wrote a lot. Some of it’s not so good.
Forcing a scholar to admit that he’s unfamiliar with a significant fact about the subject he just wrote a book on definitely counts as a point on the board for Chotiner, but this isn’t entirely the gotcha liberals seem to think it is. From Locke to Kant to Jefferson, there is a long tradition of liberal intellectuals saying obviously racist things, and few people outside the hothouse of online discourse actually thinks this disqualifies them as liberals. Chotiner’s next gotcha is even worse:
Hayek supported the 1973 coup in Chile. There are lots of things that don’t make him seem like such a democrat or liberal, correct?
The suggestion that Hayek cannot be a liberal by virtue of supporting a coup is almost too ridiculous to bother pushing back on. This is particularly true of the coup in Chile, which was sold as a defense of democracy against Communist dictatorship. But here, too, the typical response by liberal New Yorker readers has been to treat this as another damning gotcha.
Sunstein, again, has his own share of legitimately goofy statements in here: just before this passage, for example, he seems to defend Hayek as a liberal on the grounds that his wife engaged in charming correspondence with John Stuart Mill. He also has a fairly implausible reading of contemporary politics; he is unwilling to kick Samuel Alito out of the liberal tent, for example, and his justification is that Alito provides a fig leaf of juridsprudential rationalization over his reflexive deference to Trump in his opinions.
But Chotiner’s readers aren’t just annoyed by those passages. They are absolutely scandalized, for example, that Sunstein would consider the great neoliberal Ronald Reagan to be a liberal. Reading through the reactions, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that a lot of Americans think of liberalism as meaning something like “good politics” or “supporting Democrats.” But if we adopt the definition of liberal that I’ve advanced here, it is clear that Reagan conceived of politics through its lens.
So while I have my objections to some of the arguments and figures that Sunstein advances here, I think that his “big-tent” conception of liberalism is largely grounded in the history and the scholarship.
As for McManus, my case is more straightforward. Matt McManus has written a book called Liberal Socialism in which he aspires to “recover” a tradition of liberalism that is compatible with socialism. What this would specifically have to mean is to establish a liberalism that does not facilitate private property rights.
But while you can patch together some obscure Rawls footnotes and Mill commentary that, if you squint at it the right way, seems to not insist on private property rights,1 this is at best an utterly fringe strand of liberalism that is directly at odds with the entire liberal mainstream. It is neither the liberalism that protected the property of the rising bourgeois class from feudal confiscation nor the liberalism that set itself against nationalization throughout the 20th and early 21st century.
Liberalism has been advocated by people who said racist things and by people who said things that vaguely resembled socialism, but it is no more defensible to say that there is a liberal socialism than it is to say that there is a liberal racism. The difference between Sunstein and McManus is that Sunstein is not insisting that there is such a thing as liberal racism; he is merely accepting that some liberals have said racist shit. McManus, on the other hand, really wants to believe in something called liberal socialism.
It has to be added here, contra McManus, that a liberalism which allows nationalization but permits private property is a very different thing from socialism, which mandates nationalization and forbids private property.