The Case Against the Liberal Bogeyman

Across the ideological spectrum, a peculiar consensus has emerged: liberalism is the problem. From national conservatives who see it as the solvent dissolving traditional communities to post-liberal leftists who regard it as the architecture of inequality, the liberal tradition has become a shared antagonist — a unifying villain in an otherwise fractured political landscape. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein pushes back against this framing, arguing that critics are committing a fundamental category error: mistaking a set of institutional commitments for a sentient historical force.

Sunstein's core claim is deceptively simple. Liberalism — understood as the cluster of principles including free speech, due process, individual rights, and constitutional governance — is not an agent. It does not act in the world the way a person or a conspiracy does. It is a framework, one designed to allow people with deeply different convictions to coexist under shared rules. To blame that framework for the failures of the actors operating within it, Sunstein contends, is both analytically confused and politically dangerous.

The Personification Trap

The tendency to treat abstract systems as villains has deep roots in political rhetoric. Marxist critique long personified capital as a force with its own logic and appetite. Conservative critics of modernity have similarly cast secularism or "the Enlightenment project" as quasi-demonic agents of decline. What is newer is the convergence: thinkers on the populist right and the progressive left now share a common target in "liberalism," even if they disagree on nearly everything else.

Sunstein's objection is not that liberal societies are without serious problems. Economic inequality, civic fragmentation, and the erosion of communal bonds are real phenomena that demand serious analysis. His objection is to the explanatory move that attributes these outcomes to liberalism as such — as though the principles of free expression or equal protection under law carry within them a hidden code for social dissolution. This is what he characterizes as ideological melodrama: the search for a singular, dark essence behind the political order, when the reality is far more contingent and diffuse.

The comparison to literary villainy — Sunstein's suggestion that critics treat liberalism as though it were Voldemort — is pointed. It highlights the narrative structure underlying much anti-liberal argument: the conviction that if only the hidden antagonist could be named and defeated, the social order would be restored to health. This is a satisfying story. Whether it is a useful one for understanding complex institutional failures is another matter entirely.

What Gets Lost in the Critique

The stakes of the debate are not merely academic. When a political framework is recast as a malevolent force, the institutional protections it provides become suspect by association. Free speech is reframed as a mechanism for harm rather than a safeguard against power. Due process is dismissed as procedural obstruction rather than a check on arbitrary authority. The risk, in Sunstein's account, is that dismantling the liberal scaffolding removes the very constraints that prevent authoritarian consolidation — from any direction.

This is not a novel concern. Throughout the twentieth century, movements that defined themselves against liberalism — whether fascist, communist, or theocratic — tended to replace its imperfect protections with systems that concentrated power more ruthlessly. The historical record does not prove that liberal institutions are sufficient to prevent social harm, but it does suggest that their absence tends to produce harms of a different and often graver magnitude.

Sunstein's defense, then, is less a celebration of the status quo than a plea for analytical precision. Societies can reform their institutions, redistribute resources, and rebuild communal ties without concluding that the underlying commitment to pluralism and individual rights is the source of the problem. The question is whether the current political mood — impatient with proceduralism, hungry for narrative clarity — has the appetite for that kind of distinction.

What remains unresolved is whether Sunstein's framing is itself too tidy. If liberalism is merely a neutral set of commitments, why do liberal societies exhibit such consistent patterns of atomization and market dominance? If the framework is blameless, where does responsibility actually reside — with individual actors, with specific policies, with cultural forces that liberalism enabled but did not intend? The tension between liberalism as a set of principles and liberalism as a lived political order is precisely where the most productive disagreement lies, and neither its defenders nor its critics have fully reckoned with the gap between the two.

With reporting from Arts and Letters Daily.

Source · Arts and Letters Daily