Early this September, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was greeted at Heathrow Airport by five armed police officers, who placed him under arrest for a series of social media posts attacking transgender activists. It was a particularly prominent example of a general United Kingdom trend: By some estimates the British police made over 12,000 arrests for offensive posting in 2023, an average of about 33 per day.
The Linehan case caused a special uproar, with terms like “totalitarianism” and “police state” liberally deployed. But the comedian’s defenders were much more likely to attack the general system of censorship and ideological policing than any particular figure in Britain’s left-of-center government. It was rare indeed to hear the unhappy Keir Starmer, currently one of the most unpopular prime ministers in modern British history, depicted as an autocrat intent throwing his ideological enemies in jail.
Contrast this story with the Jimmy Kimmel affair in the United States, where the brief suspension of a late-night comedian was widely portrayed as a dictatorial act by Donald Trump, using his Federal Communications Committee chairman as a henchman. Apart from a few eccentric libertarians, none of Kimmel’s defenders complained that the F.C.C. as an institution had devolved into speech-policing authoritarianism; they just blamed Trump himself for warping its mandate and abusing its powers.
These two cases are helpful in understanding general developments in Western politics, as the norms of post-Cold War liberalism break down and “postliberal” tendencies take hold. These tendencies exist within both progressivism and populism — the impulse to police and censor speech, the increasing potency of identitarian appeals, the impatience with claims to neutrality and procedural fairness, the urge to reduce all politics to existential conflict.
But they take substantially different forms on the left versus the right — and those differences help explain why people on either side of the divide struggle so mightily to understand their opponents and see today’s dangers through their eyes.
The divide starts with a crucial asymmetry. In both the United States and Europe, the political right has plenty of popular support but considerably less influence inside the managerial systems through which elected officials actually exercise their power. By contrast, progressivism often starts with a weaker base of popular support — for decades, more Americans have identied as conservative than liberal — but its core believers enjoy an extraordinary advantage in the meritocratic institutions, private as well as public, that actually staff and shape the power structure.
Given this asymmetry, in an environment of increasing polarization where liberal norms are losing purchase, you would expect each side to embrace a postliberalism that plays to its distinctive strengths.
That’s exactly what has happened. Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.
Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda.
There are exceptions to this pattern, but it’s pretty consistent across Western countries. Whether with Trump or Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France or Viktor Orban in Hungary or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the drama of postliberal populism is intensely personal, serving up figures who become the focus of profound loyalty and intense opposition, who present themselves as champions of the forgotten man while they’re attacked as strongmen in the making.
The drama of postliberal progressivism, in contrast, is a drama of ideological influence and institutional power, in which activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters. It’s a drama where sudden changes seem to just happen — unprecedented waves of immigration on both continents, a radical shift in official American norms around race or sex, a new regime of euthanasia in Canada — without having a singular progressive leader who claims responsibility and provides the policy with a charismatic face.
With some of these changes, progressives argue that they’re happening outside politics entirely and thus can’t be oppressive or threatening in the way that a charismatic right-wing demagogue can be. How can the woke be running everything in Britain, they ask, if there were Tory prime ministers until recently? How is it the Democratic Party’s fault if private universities impose ideological litmus tests or social media mobs get people fired by private employers? How can it be “postliberal” or censorious for social media giants to police their users’ speech when they’re private companies?
But political influence takes many different forms. Immigration policy in Western countries can be set as much by judicial and bureaucratic interpretations of treaty obligations as by officially elected governments. The woke turn on college campuses was driven by activist enthusiasm, but it was also encouraged by Obama administration pressure to change policies around sexual assault and gender identity. Even before the Biden administration started pressuring them directly, social media companies set their censorship rules under the shadow of congressional Democratic criticism and with the expectation that the Trump era would be temporary and progressive power enduring.
Maybe the postliberal left will find a charismatic political leader eventually, an All-American Hugo Chávez or a Zohran Mamdani with appeal beyond New York City. But for now it tends toward a complex blend of public and private operations, with anonymous midlevel decision makers taking radical or coercive steps below the surface while the official left-of-center leadership, whether a Joe Biden or a Keir Starmer, bobs along vaguely up above.
It would be immensely helpful to our debates if more sincere liberals could be persuaded that this style of progressivism really is a postliberal form of politics, that its authoritarian tendencies are not just invented by fearful conservatives and that it can make moves against its enemies — like arresting them for tweets, let’s say — that would be screaming front-page news if populist governments made them.
But then it would also be helpful for conservatives to acknowledge why the populist alternative can seem so threatening as well. The threat I have in mind is not the strategy that populists understand themselves to be undertaking, trying to use their political advantages to beat the progressives at the inside game. (For instance, to pluck a Trump administration foray from this week, by answering the leftward lurch in higher education by tying federal funds to protections for free speech and ideological diversity.) That form of populist power politics could be ultimately stabilizing, establishing some kind of balance in the cultural arena, reducing the sense of alienation the conservative-leaning public feels toward the elite.
Where a sense of threat is much more justified is in the personalist aspect of populist postliberalism, the way that it encourages a kind of courtier’s politics, organized around fealty to a great leader (and his heirs and favorites), in which whim and appetite hold sway.
Progressivism has absolutely weaponized the law against its opponents, but it’s still more constitutionally destabilizing when the president himself is screaming on social media about the need to prosecute his enemies.
Elite progressive culture makes room for all kinds of self-enrichment and self-dealing, but the way that liberal politicians cash in still pales in comparison with the brazen corruption and conflicts of interest on display in Trump 2.0.
Faceless bureaucracies can and do deploy violence against their enemies, but the commander in chief posting about how he might go all Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore on American cities still feels like a uniquely authoritarian “joke.”
I wouldn’t say the obsequious flattery that surrounds Trump is worse than the struggle sessions I’ve observed inside progressive institutions — those were pretty bad — but it’s still the language of a czar’s court, where the ruler is untouchable and only wicked advisers ever make things go astray.
The country chose this personalist kind of postliberalism out of fear of the alternative, and there is great wisdom in understanding the landscape in which that choice was made.
But personalism alone cannot stabilize or govern durably, any more than elite progressivism can simply manage democratic sentiment away. Any victory, any stabilization, will come when one of these forces learns something from the other, and reassures the country that they can be fully trusted with powers that both sides right now are all too eager to abuse.
Source photographs by Jacob Wackerhausen and RunPhoto/Getty Images
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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