In Defense of Liberalism

We must defend the marketplace of ideas, even when we’re sure we’re right.

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About the author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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Last week, prominent right-wing political activist Christopher Rufo seemed to signal that the time had come for illiberal measures in the culture war. On X, he posted:

The Right is learning new political tactics. We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the “classical liberals” who forfeited all of the institutions. We’re going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.

A Wall Street Journal profile reported that Rufo aims to borrow tactics from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist and early Critical Theorist. Gramsci is famous for developing the concept of “cultural hegemony,” the idea that controlling the marketplace of ideas is key to shaping public opinion.

What does pursuing cultural hegemony look like? One example can be seen in the Trump administration’s efforts to influence the ideological makeup of Harvard’s faculty. In a recent letter, the administration pushed Harvard to “reduc[e] the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than to scholarship” and ensure adequate “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring” (as defined by the administration). This marks a sharp break from tradition: as Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, it amounts to imposing “ideological litmus tests” for faculty.

Carried out at scale, this approach would help create the kind of cultural hegemony Rufo envisions, with universities across the country being forced to hire and empower only those scholars who espouse what the administration considers to be the “right” ideas. As Rufo argues, “the idea that universities are neutral, autonomous, or ‘free marketplaces of ideas’” is “deluded.”

Of course, it’s not just Rufo or the Trump administration who believe epistemic liberalism (i.e. the marketplace of ideas) has failed us. Today, the far-left and far-right are united in their opposition to philosophical liberalism. For example, left-wing scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi has proposed an “Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment” that would grant the federal government sweeping authority to crack down on ideas he deems racist.

In a fine example of horseshoe theory, many on the right—beyond just Rufo—have also begun to abandon epistemic liberalism. For “post-liberals” like Sohrab Amari, liberalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. They argue that the open marketplace of ideas isn't a strength but a vulnerability—because harmful ideas can enter that marketplace and gain influence. As Ahmari puts it, in lieu of the marketplace of ideas, we need something more like cultural hegemony: “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

But despite what its critics allege, epistemic liberalism contains profound virtues. Chief among them is its answer to a question that should haunt anyone who advocates for ideas in public: what if we’re wrong?