Authoritarianism and the Modern Liberal State

I’ve written many words on the authoritarian tendencies of Germany in particular and the modern Western state in general. It is the main focus of my blog. Whenever I describe some new repressive development, as I did on Wednesday, I receive always the same kinds of comments. Readers tell me that fascism must be returning to Germany and that our inherent National Socialist tendencies are manifesting themselves yet again. Others write that this is all happening because in Europe we do not have the American Bill of Rights, which means that we cannot fend off rapacious state bureaucrats with our guns. Many say that we did not draw sufficient lessons from our earlier experiences with totalitarianism.

Now, I fully agree with the spirit of these remarks. I too want to live in a world where the state does not arbitrarily house-arrest me and inject me with experimental medical substances whenever some virus is making the rounds. Precisely for these reasons, I think it’s important to understand why our states act the way that they do. This means clearing away some old myths. “Totalitarianism,” for example, is a caricature that liberal thinkers adopted in the postwar period to describe rival illiberal nationalist and communist ideologies. There are no self-identified totalitarians anywhere and no body of explicitly totalitarian political theory exists. What is more, modern-day German authoritarianism is basically the opposite of Nazism and is rooted in profound antifascist sensibilities. And while I have nothing against the right to bear arms (and would happily see this right reintroduced to the Continent), it is not the political panacea many seem to think it is. To beat back the state, you need something else entirely – something that is just as eagerly suppressed in the United States as it is here in the Federal Republic.

All of these theses owe something to the classical liberal perspective – the Western ideological tradition that emphasises freedom, individual rights and equality before the law. Many of my readers are classical liberals, and that’s totally fine. If I do not entirely share your views, that’s not because I want to take away all of your rights and freedoms. It’s rather because I think liberalism makes a variety of empirically incorrect claims about human nature, and also that it seriously misunderstands state power. Thus liberal mechanisms for binding the state have failed, and long association with the ruling elite has changed the nature of liberalism itself. Classical, negative-rights liberalism – where the state mainly locks up violent criminals and defends private property rights – has become defunct everywhere, precisely because it is inconvenient for people in charge. Elites have replaced it with positive-rights liberalism instead, where the state spends vast sums on social welfare programmes, sends your kids to Drag Queen Story Hour and blames white people for disproportionate black criminality. This successor ideology uses many of the same words and claims to be interested in many of the same things, but is in fact an entirely different animal.

In what follows, I will try to describe state authoritarianism objectively – not from within the world of liberal assumptions, but from outside and sub specie aeternitatis. The truth is that modern liberalism, although it has retained much of its anti-authoritarian rhetoric, has presided over massive expansions to state power. To the extent Westerners have enjoyed more freedom from state harassment than East Europeans under communism or Germans under National Socialism, that has less to do with liberalism itself than with other supervening factors that have made the elevation of liberalism to a civic religion possible in the first place. If you’re truly interested in freedom and personal autonomy, it’s worth thinking about what is necessary to make states actually back off and leave you alone in reality, whatever ideology their leaders espouse.