A Society Can Be Too Free to Defend Itself From the People Inside It

Every liberal society contains people who want it to stop being one. Some want a theocracy, some a strongman, some a revolution that ends with themselves in charge. In a small enough number they are a curiosity. Above some threshold they are a problem, and the problem has a peculiar shape: every tool the society could use against them looks like the thing the society exists to forbid.

I want to describe that shape, because I think it is usually described badly, as a paradox to be admired rather than a design problem to be solved.

The Trap

Suppose a movement openly declares that, once in power, it will abolish elections. The liberal instinct is to answer with argument, and the instinct is right as far as it goes. But argument is slow, and the movement is not arguing; it is recruiting.

So the society considers doing something. Ban the party. Restrict its speech. Watch its members. Bar them from certain offices. And at every step someone says, correctly, that this is what the enemy would do. A society that bans parties is not one in which parties are free. A society that watches its citizens is a surveillance state. The remedy is indistinguishable from the disease, and a society that values its freedoms more than anything else will therefore refuse the remedy, and lose.

This is often presented as a deep tension in liberalism. I think it is something less grand: a confusion between two different things that both get called freedom.

Two Different Freedoms

The first is the freedom to hold and state a view. The second is the freedom to organise for the purpose of removing the first from everyone else.

These are not the same, and only the first is the one worth dying for. A liberal society does not lose anything it cares about by constraining the second. It loses something it cares about enormously by constraining the first, which is why the constraints must never be allowed to slide from one to the other, and why they always try to.

The line is not where the opinion is. A person may believe that elections should be abolished, and say so, and write books about it. The line is at action against the mechanism: organising violence, organising to seize the means of coercion, using an office to dismantle the process that filled it. Belief is untouchable. Sabotage of the machine is not.

Stated that way the trap loosens. The society is not being asked to punish thoughts. It is being asked to protect a mechanism, and protecting a mechanism is an engineering task, not a betrayal of principle.

Who Draws the Line

The harder question is who gets to say where the line falls, because whoever does can move it.

This is where the usual answer, the government, fails. A government that may decide which movements threaten the system will discover that its opponents threaten the system. Every regime that has ever suppressed dissent has done so in the name of defending something. Handing the line to the people in power is handing them the one weapon that cannot be taken back, and it is the reason liberal societies rightly hesitate.

The judiciary is the standard fallback, and it is better, but courts interpret laws that legislatures write and are staffed by people that governments appoint. They slow the abuse; they do not prevent it.

The only body that cannot use the line against the public is the public. A society in which the question "is this movement a threat to our ability to govern ourselves" is put directly to the whole population, and answered by it, has a defence that no government can turn into an instrument. The majority may answer wrongly; majorities do. But it cannot answer in its own interest against itself, which is the specific failure the trap is about. This is one of the places where I think direct decision at the highest level is not merely preferable but the only coherent answer.

The Cost of Refusing to Decide

There is a version of liberalism that treats the trap as a reason to do nothing, on the theory that a free society which defends itself has already stopped being free, and it is better to lose honourably.

I have no patience with this. A society is not a proposition that can be kept pure by inaction. It is a set of arrangements that exist as long as they are maintained and stop existing when they are not. Refusing to defend them does not preserve them; it hands them to whoever wanted them gone. The people who paid for the freedoms did not pay for them so that their heirs could decline to keep them on a technicality.

The freedom to speak must be absolute. The mechanism that lets everyone speak must be defended, by the people it serves, against the people who would end it. Those two commitments are not in tension. Confusing them is the trap, and the confusion has been fatal more than once.