The Tragedy of Liberal Self-Doubt

   In October 2024, Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh published a piece that asked: “Can liberals be trusted with liberalism?” His answer is: Most of the time, yes, but in a crisis, no. The crisis he cites is the explosion of “wokeism” around 2020, which he believes centrist liberals were ill-equipped to resist.

Never mind that “milquetoast liberals,” as Ganesh describes them, were right about wokeism from the beginning. Many prominent liberals recognized that wokeism is a bastardization (and in many cases, an inversion) of the liberal values it claims to represent: equality, fairness, tolerance, pluralism, and so on. But Ganesh argues that liberals didn’t fight wokeism with sufficient zeal. Instead, they stayed at a “safe distance” until the fight was over and left all the hard work to “cranks and single-issue fanatics.”

One such “fanatic,” in Ganesh’s estimation, is the evolutionary biologist and famous atheist Richard Dawkins. In an effort to demonstrate that Dawkins is no milquetoast liberal, Ganesh emphasizes his unapologetically contemptuous attitude toward religion. He then summarizes the objections a squishy centrist liberal might have to Dawkins:

‘Dawkins punches down.’ But is he wrong? ‘His arrogance alienates more people than his eloquence converts.’ But is he wrong? ‘He strays into cultural terrain nowadays.’ Is he wrong, though? And then the ultimate midwit dinner party cliché, the verbal equivalent of having a Banksy print on your wall: ‘Atheism has become a religion in itself.’ Fine, whatever. Is. Dawkins. Wrong? If so, what about? Where do you stand?

Ganesh is feeling his way toward his main point, which is that liberals won’t say where they stand on any number of positions — from wokeism to the harmful effects of religion. His implication is that Dawkins brought the militancy of his atheism to his fight against wokeism. And though this was necessary, it makes liberals uncomfortable.

For someone demanding straight answers from mealy-mouthed liberals about the blight of wokeism, it’s strange that Ganesh doesn’t mention any of Dawkins’s positions on the subject. The closest he comes to doing so is his opaque observation that Dawkins “strays into cultural terrain nowadays.” One such foray onto this terrain was a 2021 tweet in which Dawkins wondered why it’s socially acceptable to identify as a gender other than the one you were born with, while it’s unacceptable for a white person to identify as black. In a footnote to an essay titled “Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary,” Dawkins said he’s “only too aware of the elaborately planted minefield of constantly evolving neologisms and proliferating pronouns, through and around which academics in some humanities departments are obliged to tiptoe.”

It is perhaps true that Dawkins has become more offensive to capital-L liberals (those on the mainstream left) in recent years, as his hostility to trans activism and other forms of wokeness has intensified. His X timeline today is filled with commentary on culture war flashpoints, from attacks on “trans ideology” to criticism of “condescending wokeism” more broadly. But Ganesh doesn’t point to a single example of what he regards as Dawkins’s “fanaticism.” It’s fine if he regards Dawkins as a “crank” (I disagree). But the entire point of his article is that milquetoast liberals like himself have to hand it to fire-breathing “fanatics” like Dawkins:

I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it. (Dawkins would be awesome in a crisis.)

Again, what is this mysterious element of “extremism” in Dawkins’s work? Ganesh can’t just be referring to Dawkins’s pugnacity — it’s possible to be an acerbic critic while holding moderate views. Ganesh muddles his argument even more when he offers another self-critical admonition about the failures of centrist liberals:

There is now some data to support the anecdotal impression that woke-ism at its most censorious peaked a few years ago. I wish those of us in the liberal centre could take a bow. But who led the resistance when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug.

So, it turns out that you don’t need to be an extremist to fight extremism — you can just be a “political casual with a radar for humbug.” Or one of those single-issue feminists Ganesh declines to name. Christina Hoff Sommers? Camille Paglia? They’re certainly anti-woke, but it’s hardly true to say they “led the resistance” to wokeism. Ganesh raises even more basic questions about his argument when he declares that “rightwing free speech zealots” were somehow indispensable in the fight against wokeism.

Does Ganesh have any examples of these crusading right-wingers in mind? Jordan Peterson? Ben Shapiro? He doesn’t say, which makes it impossible to debate the merits of his argument. Aside from Dawkins, he mentions just one other name in the piece: “Not all liberals deserted. Malcolm Gladwell and others signed a Harper’s Magazine letter about creative freedom when that took some fibre. But don’t let’s pretend this was typical of the wider caste.” It’s strange to single out Gladwell, honorable though his signature was — the Harper’s letter, an unambiguous condemnation of the “dogma,” “coercion,” “censoriousness,” and “blinding moral certainty” of wokeism, was signed by over 150 people. Many of these signatories could comfortably be described as centrist liberals: Steven Pinker, Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, Yascha Mounk, John McWhorter, David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Fareed Zakaria, Cathy Young, Thomas Chatterton Williams, J.K. Rowling, and dozens more.

Perhaps these writers and academics would prefer to describe themselves as something other than centrist liberals, but I doubt they would be too offended by the label. There was plenty of ideological diversity among the signatories, which included both Noam Chomsky and David Frum. But what you can’t fail to notice is that a substantial proportion of the signatories — who Ganesh admits showed “some fibre” at a time when authoritarian wokeism was at its height — were exactly the sort of liberals that he accuses of cowering from the fight.

The Harper’s letter is just one example of the staunch opposition to wokeism among centrist liberals. In July 2020, a group of linguists attempted to get Steven Pinker removed from a list of “distinguished fellows” of the Linguistic Society of America, claiming that he had a “pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence.” This is nonsense — Pinker’s offense was merely citing several studies and experts on urban crime whose conclusions didn’t align with the orthodoxies of the day. For example, he observed that the focus on race in police shootings can obscure more fundamental issues around crime and policing, and he argued that “under-policing” can be deadly. He has also rightly argued that efforts to censor people for falling afoul of woke taboos can swell the ranks of extreme right-wing movements. Pinker was challenging “wokeism” before it was in vogue — his work on human nature (such as his 2003 book The Blank Slate) has long infuriated many progressives, as it acknowledges innate differences between people.

The linguist John McWhorter was one of Pinker’s defenders in 2020, and he’s a centrist liberal who’s also a fierce critic of wokeism. In 2021, he published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, a book that attacks wokeism directly. McWhorter didn’t “stroll up to the pub brawl and tut just as it was petering out,” which is what Ganesh accuses centrist liberals of doing. He didn’t stand at a “safe distance” — he penned a direct attack on the dogmatic and authoritarian overreach of wokeism when it was at its peak.

There are countless other centrist liberals who did the same the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has never been a fan of the word “woke,” but he has frequently attacked mindless identitarianism in his work. His memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White is a powerful call to move beyond the restrictive categories of race entirely — the “colorblindness” which many identitarian activists regard as a stealth vehicle for racism. In August, Williams will publish Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, a book which he says will critique the emergence of a “genuine cult of what was in theory ‘antiracism’ and ‘social justice’ but in practice felt more like the polar opposites of both.”

Other examples abound. In 2023, the political scientist Yascha Mounk published The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which critically examined the intellectual roots of wokeism. In 2018, Francis Fukuyama published Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which was critical of the identitarianism that underpins wokeism — as well as the identity politics of populist movements like Trumpism. Even J.K. Rowling has spent years criticizing various forms of trans activism. Perhaps Rowling is one of the “single-issue feminists” Ganesh has in mind, but this would only demonstrate that someone can simultaneously meet that description and be a centrist liberal.

Ganesh’s argument about who deserves credit for countering wokeism is backwards. The most thoughtful and credible anti-woke voices have always come from the liberal center, and they helped to make opposition to wokeism politically palatable. Many on the right who have made wokeism their primary political crusade often have their own forms of identity politics, from Christian nationalism to white grievance mongering. The populist right has fueled wokeism — for four years, Trump’s xenophobia and nativism were a constant, mobilizing source of outrage for the “woke” left. He told racially diverse congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He tried to ban Muslims from the country. His rhetoric has only become uglier with time — he now says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump doesn’t resist wokeism, he justifies it.

Right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro who have branded themselves free speech warriors were too partisan to lead a fundamental cultural shift around wokeism. They may have inflamed anti-woke sentiments among their own audiences, but their appeal was limited. Many members of the anti-woke “heterodox” right have the same problem. Figures like Jordan Peterson have spent years railing against “postmodern neo-Marxism” and warning that gender neutral pronouns and various forms of campus activism are harbingers of a new Stalinism. This ludicrous fear mongering may have won some converts, but it was also transparently demagogic and silly.

What it took to defeat wokeism was resistance from the sensible center. When the Democratic Party was briefly mired in wokeism during the 2020 presidential primary, Joe Biden — a moderate who was less captured by woke fervor than his fellow candidates — emerged as the winner, and went on to defeat Trump. When Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump in November, it was partly because she couldn’t escape how she ran during the 2020 primary. She praised the “defund the police movement” in a June 2020 interview. She described the idea of a border wall as “un-American,” only to support funding for such a wall in 2024. Trump constantly emphasized Harris’s brief flirtation with wokeism. One particularly popular campaign ad called attention to her support for taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners and concluded: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Despite all this, Harris’s campaign was actually proof that Democrats have largely left wokeism behind. She intentionally avoided identity politics. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn’t emphasize the historic implications of her gender. She didn’t take the bait when political opponents accused her of being a “DEI hire.” She leaned into the aspects of her candidacy that were liabilities in the 2020 primary, such as her record as California Attorney General. But Harris still failed to dispel the notion that she’s a woke California progressive, and Democrats know it. They will likely avoid elevating a candidate with similar baggage in the future.

In one sense, the decline of wokeism was overdetermined — it was always too strenuous and irrational to last. As it became more dogmatic, it created a culture of fear and censorship that stifled open discussion, alienated potential supporters, and led to constant infighting and heresy hunting. As it became more illiberal, its stated commitments to equality, diversity, and so on looked increasingly hollow — and created ever-stronger cognitive dissonance among its adherents. As it became more authoritarian, it gave opportunists like Trump a chance to discredit his opposition. The people who have been making this case since the beginning are the centrist liberals Ganesh condemns as complacent cowards.

One of the most fundamental problems with our political discourse today is the idea that consistent defenders of liberal values — free expression, individual rights, pluralism, and democracy — are somehow boring reactionaries. But a reassertion of those values has never been more necessary. Americans just reelected a president who attempted to overthrow an election right before their eyes. Trust in democratic institutions has plummeted. While we may have hit peak wokeism, the temptations of identity politics and other forms of tribalism are always strong.

Historically speaking, there’s no such thing as a “milquetoast liberal.” The liberal values that we take for granted today are hard-won political achievements that are extremely radical by historical standards — and even by many contemporary standards, considering the resurgent authoritarianism around the world. It’s a tragedy that these values — which are the legacy of radical Enlightenment thinkers who developed them in the face of (and in response to) tyranny, superstition, and violence — have faded into the background of modern life.

Ganesh takes part in a long liberal tradition of self-criticism and self-doubt. One liability of liberalism is that it doesn’t offer the intoxication of tribalism and certainty provided by religion and other ideologies. It’s a political framework that allows citizens to believe what they want, as long as they don’t prevent others from doing so. It enables diverse people to live together and resolve their differences peacefully. It offers freedom and self-determination. Those who defend liberalism as an end in itself don’t tend to be fanatical or extreme, but that doesn’t make their project any less radical.