A whole slew of conservative (or conservative-ish) writers are taking on the idea of “illiberal liberalism,” by which they mean a liberalism that tries to exclude dogmatic religious communities from respectable public debate, or which puts such restraints on those communities (by, say, forbidding them to use religious justifications for their public-policy preferences) that they are forced to lose what makes them special. In layman’s terms, their complaint is this: Liberals, who claim to be tolerant, are actually intolerant of religious people and want to ban them from the public square. Thus, “illiberal liberalism.”
But most liberals want nothing more than what Will Wilkinson himself endorses: not a ban on “crazy conservative talk radio” or “crazy religion-saturated politics,” but the “peaceful natural deaths” of the communities that feed, and feed on, these low forms of discourse.
This, to me, is the defining difference between the committed liberal and the committed social-conservative. The liberal wants to see his enemies persuaded, wants to see them lose adherents and prestige, but he doesn’t want to legally enforce his preferences. Richard Dawkins, for example, wants to convince people to cast away their notions of God and commit themselves to secular humanism. But, even if he and his allies had the votes, they wouldn’t seek to proscribe the choices that religious people want to make. At least, that is, if we take them at their words. We have no reason not to.
If all this is right, Noah Millman’s argument for a liberalism “both more confident and more humble about its own truths” starts to look silly. Surely liberals already have the confidence to defend the “positive goods” that they adhere to (like science), and do not merely complain that conservatives are “smuggling sectarian religion into the public square.” If I ever heard someone say that we should teach evolution just because we don’t want to teach religion, I would laugh at him… but I doubt anybody has ever said that.
By the same token, I think liberals are already “humble” enough to “recognize that communities with illiberal commitments are bound to continue to exist.” We don’t harbor any illusions. And we don’t want to destroy these illiberal communities, not at all. Neither does poor Damon Linker (who set off this blogo-war), and who only pointed out that, as much as religious conservatives lament the “culture of choice,” the only alternative is an authoritarian culture that strips away choice. Religious conservatives want people to make better (by their lights) choices, much as liberals want people to become skeptical and tolerant. But when the law is used as an instrument to enforce one’s preferred choices, and to ban or delegitimate the alternatives, that’s when we have a problem. As far as I can tell, no “liberal” advocates such a use of the law. Even as conservatives rail against “judicial legislation” on issues like abortion and gay marriage, they complain only about the protection of others’ choices, not the infringement of their own.
