Fair point. But I think there’s a genuine structural asymmetry here. When liberal democracies commit atrocities, they do so by violating their own safeguards—secrecy, executive overreach, circumventing checks and balances. The CIA’s Cold War operations required hiding what they were doing from Congress and the public, precisely because the actions were incompatible with the system’s principles. And liberal democracies contain built-in self-correcting mechanisms: free press, independent courts, elections, public accountability. The US eventually declassified the documents and the atrocities became part of the historical record that we can openly discuss and condemn. This self-correction is a core feature of classical liberalism.
The “not real communism” defense has the opposite problem. Concentrating all power in a vanguard party, suppressing class enemies, and eliminating institutional checks aren’t deviations from Marxism-Leninism, they’re core features. Once you’ve done all that, totalitarian horror isn’t a failure of implementation but a foreseeable consequence of the design. (Also, the CCP is still putting Mao on all their banknotes.)
”Time-tested” doesn’t mean “never fails”, it means better outcomes on average, less catastrophic failures, and mechanisms to recognize and correct its own failures. The right question isn’t “does liberalism guarantee safety?” (nothing does), it’s “which system produces the best outcomes and has the strongest safeguards?” The historical record is pretty clear.
On the Nazis exploiting Weimar democracy
The argument seems to be essentially: “Nazis rose to power in a liberal society, therefore liberalism enabled Nazism.” But this arguably confuses background conditions with causation. The Nazis also exploited elections, but most people still seem quite partial to them.
The actual causal story involves the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, Weimar’s specific constitutional weaknesses, the mutual radicalization spiral between communists and Nazis, and the political establishment’s catastrophic miscalculation in thinking they could “control” Hitler. Free speech was a minor ingredient, if that.
The fact that safeguards sometimes fail doesn’t mean the safeguards are the problem. Some people die in car crashes even while wearing seatbelts.
The wide classical liberalism bucket
I agree that not all values in the admittedly wide “classical liberal bucket” are equally anti-fanatical. For what it’s worth, I’m quite concerned about extreme wealth inequality, partly because it enables potential oligarchs to subvert the very system of liberal democracy. But the core claim is about the procedural principles—separation of powers, rule of law, universal rights, institutional checks—and those seem pretty robustly anti-fanatical to me.
Thanks for the comment!
On the No True Scotsman concern
Fair point. But I think there’s a genuine structural asymmetry here. When liberal democracies commit atrocities, they do so by violating their own safeguards—secrecy, executive overreach, circumventing checks and balances. The CIA’s Cold War operations required hiding what they were doing from Congress and the public, precisely because the actions were incompatible with the system’s principles. And liberal democracies contain built-in self-correcting mechanisms: free press, independent courts, elections, public accountability. The US eventually declassified the documents and the atrocities became part of the historical record that we can openly discuss and condemn. This self-correction is a core feature of classical liberalism.
The “not real communism” defense has the opposite problem. Concentrating all power in a vanguard party, suppressing class enemies, and eliminating institutional checks aren’t deviations from Marxism-Leninism, they’re core features. Once you’ve done all that, totalitarian horror isn’t a failure of implementation but a foreseeable consequence of the design. (Also, the CCP is still putting Mao on all their banknotes.)
”Time-tested” doesn’t mean “never fails”, it means better outcomes on average, less catastrophic failures, and mechanisms to recognize and correct its own failures. The right question isn’t “does liberalism guarantee safety?” (nothing does), it’s “which system produces the best outcomes and has the strongest safeguards?” The historical record is pretty clear.
On the Nazis exploiting Weimar democracy
The argument seems to be essentially: “Nazis rose to power in a liberal society, therefore liberalism enabled Nazism.” But this arguably confuses background conditions with causation. The Nazis also exploited elections, but most people still seem quite partial to them.
The actual causal story involves the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, Weimar’s specific constitutional weaknesses, the mutual radicalization spiral between communists and Nazis, and the political establishment’s catastrophic miscalculation in thinking they could “control” Hitler. Free speech was a minor ingredient, if that.
The fact that safeguards sometimes fail doesn’t mean the safeguards are the problem. Some people die in car crashes even while wearing seatbelts.
The wide classical liberalism bucket
I agree that not all values in the admittedly wide “classical liberal bucket” are equally anti-fanatical. For what it’s worth, I’m quite concerned about extreme wealth inequality, partly because it enables potential oligarchs to subvert the very system of liberal democracy. But the core claim is about the procedural principles—separation of powers, rule of law, universal rights, institutional checks—and those seem pretty robustly anti-fanatical to me.