As illuminated in its founding documents, a deeply committed liberalism has been at the core of the United States from its inception. Each subsequent century saw this liberal promise more fully realized, sacrificing untold blood in the defense human liberties both at home, in penance for its original sins, and abroad against the authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the USSR. It was in the sharp dichotomies of the Cold War that made liberal commitment to a free, open society an article of bipartisan consensus.

Two years into Trump’s administration, we are to believe that liberalism has failed, and that the liberal consensus is to be consigned to an early grave. Sohrab Ahmari has escalated to calumnies against liberal pluralism altogether. Unfortunately this crusade, while typically intellectualized by a coterie of Conservative Catholic and Orthodox commentators, does not end with them. Reagan’s liberal sentiments on free trade and NATO are now tepid at best on the right, to say nothing of his immigration rhetoric. Senator Hawley’s (R-Mo.) heavy-handed paternalism has led the charge legislatively, with a ridiculous, if not unconstitutional, bill banning innocuous features like infinite scroll, video autoplay, and gamification. Open liberalism is sadly out of favor, and all we hear are pleas for the state to halt that trade, to bar those people. But the appeal of illiberalism goes deeper than bad populist takes.

Self-actualisation under liberalism is ultimately the responsibility of the individual. The illiberal right claimed that liberal society asks comparatively little of us, that we are untethered from our duties to fellow man. However, those thrown into liberal society are forced to reconcile themselves with the real and terrifying consequences of being free to pursue the meaningful, in that ultimately the meaningful is necessarily subject to individual discernment. We are not genetically engineered, by some Huxley-like society, to fill a predetermined station. If there is a telos or an individual purpose for us, it is through hard work, not revelation that we must find it.

For the weak men not up to the task, reordering society so they could be meekly told what to do, what to pursue, seems enticing. For those of more pernicious instincts, the idea of being the one doing the telling, liberties be damned, is a tempting salve for those who are deeply ashamed by the complete lack of power they are capable of exerting in their own lives.

Liberalism online

Much has been written on the subcultural dynamics that foster extremist politics online, but little on how being extremely online is already inextricably correlated with the kind of depressing personal life that gives radical power fantasy politics their allure. Similarly, anti-individualist politics has long been actuated by—and articulated along—tribal affiliations; within the tribe, the tribe’s accomplishments are your own.

Sexless, jobless white nationalists don’t need to confront the utter lack of achievement they have in their own lives, if they can parasitically appropriate the achievements of long-dead white men across the globe as their own. Adherents of nationalism (the kind that bubbles up thick and black from America’s forgotten places, pulling the well-meaning and guileless NYT columnists in its wake) grasp at achievements like the Moon landing or martial victories in a very personal manner, reacting with injured pride as if they themselves were spurned when any argument to the contrary arises. In his Notes on Nationalism, Orwell details the results:

“The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named.”

Communists and integralists are much the same. Hayek and Arendt both noted that, no matter the violent clashes and incompatibility of their respective ideological platforms, Weimar Nazis and Socialists saw many disaffected individuals and would-be crusaders jump from one to the other. Sohrab Ahmari himself went from Theocratic Islam to Marxism to Integralist Catholicism, across which the only coherent thread is the impulse that society should be forcefully reordered to the common good, by those with ideas much like Sohrab Ahmari.

If we are to take seriously the position that many of these movements take, these latest integralists among them, that their views are marginalised to the very brink of irrelevancy, the inclination towards less tolerant state institutions makes little strategic sense. David Lewis’s (almost game theoretic) examination of the neutral public square shows this plainly:

“Toleration is everyone’s second choice. The first choice–to suppress and yet be tolerated, to gain victory without risking defeat–is not available; the other side will see to that. The third choice is the gamble of war, and we have supposed that both sides find the odds not good enough.”

If toleration is an uneasy compromise borne from the uncertainty of your views winning out, then abandoning it when society is supposedly so arrayed against you is the height of folly. The pursuit of such an inane strategy is not rational. It is merely signalling of ideological fealty from those for whom the ideology is a second-order concern (which is why they find that ideology’s clear moral instructions stultifying and inconvenient when their efforts to advance it on others are frustrated). No matter their strategic incompatibility, this assertion of martyrdom and post-liberalism go hand-in-hand, because they both arise from the same narrow impulses to sublimate and rationalise their need to exert power over others.

The faltering of the last two years does not mean we should abandon the liberal principles upon which the nation was founded, and which have seen the country through immense trials to unparalleled prosperity. An appetite for strongmen reveals little other than one’s own weakness, as an inability to find a sufficient telos reveals nothing but a shallow incuriosity. Liberalism requires resolve in the face of unpredictability, and a fundamental understanding that “the vitalization of life comes through the embrace of uncertainty,” to quote Joshua Foa Dienstag. Some don’t have that resolve, and want to live lives sheltered from the vicissitudes emergent of free enterprise, and want praise for accomplishments they have done nothing to obtain.