What is the purpose of liberalism?
Why we oppose political violence
Infinite Scroll is a blog about the social internet - what’s happening online, what’s trending, why people act the way they do and what it means for society. I try to keep it mostly non-political, because there are more than enough political blogs that cover every single event that happens in our culture war. Politics are certainly part of what happens online, but if you’re too politics-brained you miss out on the really interesting stuff.
With that said, I am who I am and some events are large enough to require comment. If you want to avoid politics, I’ll see you next post and here’s a very cool rabbit for your trouble. Now let’s talk about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump this weekend.
When attacks like this happen, the first and most obvious thing that every political figure does is to condemn the violence. I think this is the morally correct choice, but it’s worth unpacking why.
It’s not a secret that in my day job I am quite liberal and vocally anti-Trump. I think he’s a genuinely dangerous person, far beyond the typical partisan disagreements I have with other Republicans. I think given the opportunity, he would gladly seize authoritarian power. He has little respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law, or anything else other than his own profit and power. He has a history of encouraging political violence himself. I’d even say that if he were to drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, the world would be a better place for it. So why exactly, ask some voices, should we be concerned for Trump? If he’s so awful, if he’s such a danger to democracy, if he promotes violence himself… why do we need to condemn violence against him?
When I try to wrap my head around difficult or painful topics, I tend to fall back on my core values. Before I am anything else - a Democrat, a New Yorker, an American - I am a liberal. I condemn political violence because I’m a liberal, and because I remember the purpose of liberalism.
Hundreds of years ago, pre-Enlightenment, Europeans discovered that they didn’t really agree on the nature of Christianity. Some were Catholic and followed the pope. Others were defecting to newer, hipper versions of Protestantism. Their solution to this problem was to murder each other.
It’s easy to forget from our modern, first-world vantage point that these religious wars were brutal and unrelenting. When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door, he kicked off almost two hundred straight years of barbaric religious violence. The French Wars of Religion. The Danish Count’s Feud. The Thirty Years War. The Hessian War. The Dutch Eighty Years War. The Nine Years War. The English Civil War. The Swedish War of Deposition. The Strasbourg Bishop’s War. The defining feature of European history for around 200 years is Catholics and Protestants killing each other.
These were not gentlemanly affairs. These wars routinely involved genocidal massacres of entire towns/villages for picking the wrong religion. They paraded around the enemy’s corpses as trophies. One side would execute the other by ripping their beating hearts out of their chests while still alive. Nobody was having a good time.
Enter Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism proposed the solution that both Catholics and Protestants would cease killing each other, and each person (or town, or kingdom) could choose for itself which religion they’d like to follow. Please don’t underrate how revolutionary this idea is because it seems normal now. For most of human history, ‘kill the outsider’ was a cherished tradition. But Europe was able to escape the cycle and miraculously stop the violence.
Liberalism formalized ideas like freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and governing via the consent of the governed. Catholics and Protestants still didn’t like each other much, and often tried to harass or discriminate against each other. Over time, liberalism developed norms to prevent that as well - political freedoms, tolerance, equal treatment before the law, basic human rights, etc.
Small-l liberalism at its core is a piece of civilizational technology to prevent civil wars. It’s the social contract that we settle disputes through ideas and laws, rather than at the end of a gun.
Donald Trump is dangerous precisely because he has repeatedly sought to undermine that social contract against violence. He’s encouraged police to beat up suspects. He’s suggested that ‘second amendment people’ could take matters into their own hands against Hillary Clinton. He’s asked police to shoot protestors. He’s advocated shooting migrants trying to enter the US. He threatened to deploy the military against Black Lives Matter riots and said that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He talks in charged tones about retribution killings and encourages his crowds to beat protestors.
Trump also has little respect for the rule of law or democracy. He tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He urged officials like Brad Raffensperger and Mike Pence to steal the election on his behalf. He famously instigated the January 6th Capitol invasion. He’s stolen official records and lied about it repeatedly. He’s guilty of 34 felonies because he thinks himself above the law, above institutions, and with no respect for anything but himself.
Trump’s rejection of liberal values is why he shouldn’t be considered for public office. But it’s not a reason for you to abandon your own liberal values, not a reason to attempt assassination. If you assassinate Trump, you’ve surrendered your philosophy. You’ve admitted he was right all along to call for violence. In a real sense you’ve become Trump. Going down that road only leads in a single direction, towards an all-against-all war.
“But if Trump’s going to play dirty, shouldn’t we resist? You want us to fight a fascist with peace and love?”
It sounds ridiculous, at first glance, to continue respecting all the norms while your opponent plays dirty. It makes liberalism seem like a limp-wristed, weak-willed philosophy unable to defend itself.
To this argument, I can only point to history. History is filled with genocidal empires, vicious authoritarians, fascists, communists, and evil madmen of all shapes and sizes. Somehow every one of them ends up losing to liberalism in the long run. Europe’s colonial empires all dissolved. Nazi fascism was defeated. Soviet communism was defeated. Monarchy, excepting a few remaining countries, now only exists as a quaint tourist attraction. Liberalism’s track record over the past 300 years is extraordinary.
Liberal democracy is so dominant worldwide that even brutal dictators like Vladimir Putin feel the need to at least pretend at having free democratic elections. Really consider that - the majority of dictators worldwide go through the trouble of staging fake elections. It’s because even Putin knows deep down that the only legitimate form of government is liberal democracy, and that he needs to at least pretend to respect those norms.
Cooperative, peaceful liberalism vs. violent authoritarianism might seem like a mismatch. And it is. Just not in the direction you’d think.
The biggest shame in all this is that it happened in America, a country that is doing pretty damn well in almost every way. We’re rich. We have abundant natural resources, space, and technology. We enjoy strong political freedoms. Our economy is growing and has grown regularly for decades. We are not suffering from famines or depressions or major political repression. America certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s doing fine.
That’s the backdrop for this horrible act of political violence. It’s the background for Trump’s rise in the first place, which has featured its own calls to violence. There’s no material reason any of this should be happening. Instead, we’ve driven ourselves insane due to political hysteria and polarization. And chief among the reasons we’ve gone insane is social media, with its algorithmic promotion of the most divisive messages possible.
As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
It seems to be worth mentioning that the conflict between Catholics and Protestants mentioned here, which ended in "cuius regio, eius religio" after a century and a half of religious warfare (that also included pogroms/expulsion of the ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, witch hunts, and so on) was precipitated and caused directly by the invention of the printing press—the most consequential media revolution in world history behind writing, and ahead of the internet and social media. A new medium appeared, which eventually caused the scientific revolution, but in the meantime it left a huge amount of dislocation and pain in its wake in part because it empowered violent cranks who wouldn't have been given the time of day to voice their opinions. This may include Martin Luther.
Liberalism is soft, genuinely. But it stretches. An illiberal society is stiff and will keep its shape as circumstances change, but that same stiffness makes it brittle.