The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism
The Following piece is part of a series of media output from the GCAS Magazine and GCAS Peer Review Journal. It is a summary of an interview that Andrew P. Keltner conducted with Dr. Mark Reiff from the University of California at Davis.
Please find the video interview link here: Andrew P. Keltner, PhD researcher Interviews Dr. Mark R. Reiff
Dr Reiff’s paper, “ Can Liberal Capitalism Survive” will appear in the first issue of the GCAS Review, which we expect to be out soon. The interview begins with Dr Reiff giving us a brief description of this paper, and then moves on to discuss Dr Reiff’s forthcoming book, The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism.
The general theme of the interview centers around the competing ideas of liberalism and illiberalism, or as Dr. Reiff likes to describe illiberalism, political “perfectionism.” Political perfectionism, he notes, has versions on both the right and the left side of the political spectrum. Indeed, to fully understand where a person, party, or policy lies on the political spectrum, Dr Reiff argues that one must plot their position not only on the usual horizontal left to right x-axis, but also on an additional vertical y-axis that runs between hard liberalism and hard perfectionism.
Whether it arises on the left or the right, however, Dr Reiff sees political perfectionism as consisting in a rigid, comprehensive set of beliefs about how people should live their lives, combined with the view that the role of government is to ensure that society is composed only of those who embrace and abide by this particular comprehensive set of beliefs. Dr Reiff uses the term liberalism, in contrast, not to refer only to those people on the moderate left, but rather to refer to anyone who believes in reasonable pluralism, and sees the role of government as being limited by values such as toleration, neutrality between reasonable conceptions of the good, equal concern and respect for all persons, and so on, whereas these are all values that perfectionists reject.
Dr Reiff goes on to explain that within this framework for understanding political ideologies, “neoliberalism” is actually a form of perfectionism, not a form of liberalism, despite the misleading way it has branded itself. Indeed, this is a fundamental point that Reiff raises during the interview: in order to successfully defend themselves from perfectionist attack, liberals must be more careful to separate the concepts of economic and political liberalism, a theme Dr Reiff also addresses in his upcoming paper.
In his upcoming book, however, Reiff takes the difficulty that liberals have engaging with perfectionist even further, and argues that given their embrace of completely different fundamental frameworks of political morality, liberals and perfectionists often simply end up talking past one another. Moral argument between them simply is not possible. Reiff then goes to discuss what we can still do to better protect liberalism from perfectionist attack. He discusses the long use of identity politics by white people , which demonstrates (for themselves) a sense of authentic behavior and being, and gives them a sense of moral superiority over everyone else, and how the use of identity politics on the left is a response to this.
Reiff also emphasizes the toxic relationship of this manière d’être within perfectionism creates, leading to a movement that will eventually eat itself alive. For in each perfectionist society, there is an idiosyncratic worldview — all the pieces must fit together to hold together the person's conception of the world. In a healthy liberal society people are able to discuss their ideas, transform them, change their minds, agree, disagree, etc. Perhaps this healthy liberalism looks to some like a messier way to approach politics, and life, but given that true perfection is never achievable, liberalism makes life more stable, more rewarding, more productive, and less violent.
It is understandable that Reiff’s worldview is currently pessimistic. Seemingly there are large groups of people who are in these perfectionist modes, and these groups are growing while the number of committed liberals is shrinking. Dr. Reiff proposes that there is a threshold for when society becomes saturated with illiberal perfectionism to the point of no return. He thinks it is difficult to know exactly where that threshold is, but he worries that it might be somewhere around 20%, meaning that we are already at or near or perhaps even over that tipping point in some countries. We may have already reached that point in the USA and perhaps in parts of Europe. And where we have, we may have to go through a rough political future until we can hope to return to a society with a stable liberal outlook again. This is best understood at the end of the interview when we discuss his book chapter Why Things Are Likely to Get Worse before They Get Better.
There are, nevertheless, a number of sound ideas that Dr. Reiff proposes that he argues we should employ no matter how worried we are about the future. For Reiff argues that while we should be pessimistic, we should behave like optimists. One of these ideas is a political plan for economic redistribution that could lead to more people having a secure economic position. For wherever it is present, poverty is a leading cause of stress, depression, isolation, etc. all of which can lead people to have extreme points of view. The second idea is much more a kind of advice for life, on how to have ‘normal human reactions in abnormal circumstances.’
To implement the first idea, Reiff proposes a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ — an investment fund which uses seed capital from the taxation of those who have profited most obscenely and unjustly from the recent rise in economic inequality. Sovereign wealth funds for exist in Norway and some of the more developed countries in the Middle East, but a country need not discover oil to have one. There are many sources of excessive wealth—such as profiteering from the pandemic, avoiding and evading taxes, exploiting workers at home and abroad, capitalizing on historic injustice committed against minorities and indigenous peoples and women, and monopolizing the market through technology—that can be used to seed such funds. This idea is similar to views expressed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez, among others.
Finally, the life advice we take from Dr. Reiff is the idea to have normal human reactions in abnormal times, to not be swept in the current of emotion that disguises itself as political activism or revolution. It is normal to be angry, it is normal to want conditions to change; it is not normal to blame a wide, diverse, and unorganized group of people whose only similarity is that they do not agree with you for all the problems in the world. This mantra, to be a normal human being in abnormal periods can be the thought that stops brutalism against racial groups, stops businesses from being destroyed, and allows for a wider view of the political picture that we should all be able to grasp. Perhaps we all won’t see the same thing, but according to Dr. Reiff, if we act as liberals, and not perfectionists the picture might be nicer to look at.
Thumbnail credit: Kelly Sikkema