How the Illiberal Right and Illiberal Left are Ultimately Similar
Or why there are no simple or magical solutions to society’s problems
Today, I want to talk about how the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right are ultimately similar in an important way: their preference for simple solutions to complex problems. Given the increasing prominence of both in Western politics in the past decade, I think it is an important thing to address.
As liberals, we believe in the importance of having a functioning and healthy marketplace of ideas. Our commitment to free speech, free debate, and freedom of action as long as it does not harm other people, are all basically rooted in our commitment to the marketplace of ideas.
The reason we believe in the marketplace of ideas is because we don’t believe any one individual or group of people can have all the best solutions for the problems we face. In fact, this is almost impossible, because of the complexity of the problems themselves. No individual or group can have all the information they need to solve everything effectively. Besides, even if they have all the information, there is no guarantee that they would come up with the best solutions. Life is a process of trial and error, and allowing competing views and solutions to play out is the only way we can know which ones are more sound.
Another important function of the marketplace of ideas is the negotiation, remixing and sometimes even fusion of ideas and solutions. The best ideas and the most effective solutions are often the result of compromise or fusion. Free debate in the marketplace of ideas allows this process to happen, as long as there is plenty of room for rational and respectful debate. This is why the polarization, division and echo chambers that have characterized the past decade should be a major concern for any true liberal.
In contrast to liberals, neither the illiberal Left nor the illiberal Right have any time for the marketplace of ideas. It is from this that they reject things like free speech.
What the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right have in common is that they don’t see, or rather refuse to see, the complexity of our problems, the vast amount of factors that interplay in various issues, and the fact that life is often a trial and error process. This is why they believe their simple solutions will magically work to resolve everything. For the illiberal Left, the magic solution is blindly opposing and deconstructing all aspects of the status quo, and remaking society using their theories. For the illiberal Right, the magic solution is to force society to return to a previous state, even if at the cost of trampling on freedom, democracy, and long standing standards of decency and compassion. There is no reason to expect these all-encompassing solutions to work well at all, but the fact that they haven’t been tried yet seem to be enough justification for keeping the faith in both cases.
The problem with the attitude of both the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right is that they don’t seem to have any use for historical lessons, rationality or logic. While rational thinking would demonstrate the errors in their way of thinking, and history also provides plenty of evidence against their views, for the illiberal faithful, all this don’t seem to be able to penetrate their worldview. Therefore, what they have is actually blind faith. It is blind faith, rooted in a kind of reality-defying romanticism, that is sustaining the current surge of illiberalism in the West. I believe that, the more we point this out, the sooner people can wake up from this.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who recently published her autobiography The TaraElla Story, in which she described the events that inspired her writing.
She is also the author of the Moral Libertarian Horizon books, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for Western democracies in the 21st century.
