Dear Professor Legutko,
Early this year, when Russians were positioning their troops along Ukraine’s borders and liberal democracies were debating what it all might mean, I started reading your books. I have heard that they are influential in Poland, and I am concerned about the weakening of liberal democratic commitments in our native land and more broadly in East Central Europe. Would their political identity, their liberal commitments, prove strong enough in what seemed like a new confrontation with Russians authoritarianism? It is a rather disturbing question to ask about Poland and Hungary, and to a lesser degree about other former Soviet satellites, only thirty years after the fall of communism.
A lot has been written lately about the possible reasons for this weakening, and for the contemporary appearance in the West of “post-liberalism,” but I decided to explore the issue by studying the work of Ryszard Legutko, your work, the work of a declared Polish anti-liberal, a philosopher, an educator, a former minister of education, a politician of the ruling illiberal Law and Justice party, and a member of my own generation. In our lives we have witnessed the same events — the student protests in 1968, the Prague Spring, the workers’ protests of the 1970s, Solidarity and martial law. We have read the same books, we have heard the same people. I was exhilarated by Poland’s, and the region’s, attainment of democracy in 1989, a benevolent revolution that I considered a perfectly natural and logical development. You, on the other hand, believe that adopting democratic liberalism was our homeland’s gravest mistake. You also claim, provocatively and rather counterintuitively, that liberalism, or liberal democracy, which has always been rightly regarded as communism’s eternal enemy, is in fact communism in disguise. Liberalism, in your view, is communism that is actually winning!
I was not sure what I expected to gain from reading your books. Keeping a vigilant eye on the enemy of everything I believe in? But attending to counter-narratives, even distasteful ones, can be instructive. An unapologetic liberal, I was prepared for a strange voyage. I was not wrong. When I was halfway through your book The Cunning of Freedom, Russia invaded Ukraine. Illiberal authoritarianism was on the march and liberal democracies were rapidly mobilizing. (I must note here that when you spoke before the European Parliament you condemned Moscow’s invasion in the strongest terms.) Glued to a TV, I became distracted and irascible. So many lives, all of them so similar to our own, were being destroyed, so much pain inflicted on real human beings, in the name of antiliberalism. Still, I kept reading.
In the foreword to your book The Demon in Democracy, John O’Sullivan, the British conservative commentator and erstwhile political advisor to Margaret Thatcher, tries to convince us that what you mean by liberal democracy is not liberal democracy at all. It should be called by an altogether different name, perhaps “liberal-democracy.” It is certainly not liberal democracy “as it was understood by, say, Winston Churchill or FDR or John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. That was essentially majoritarian democracy resting on constitutional liberal guarantees of free speech, free association, free media, and other liberties needed to ensure that debate was real and elections fair.” Liberal-democracy, on the other hand, is ideological, “liberationist,” and does not hesitate to restrict the freedom of persons and institutions “from parental rights to national sovereignty.” It is, in other words, precisely what conservatives denounce as “leftist” or “progressive” liberalism. Whereas the “classical liberalism” of fundamental human rights, open debate, and governments of, by, and for the people, is, for O’Sullivan, just fine.
Your repeated complaints against feminism, the “enormous privileges” of homosexuals, the “persistent attempt to deconstruct family,” multiculturalism, the general decline of public and private morals, the loss of self-restraint and shame and the sense of duty, all have a distinct odor of right-wing bigotry. But your ambition goes much further. All these modern abominations, you claim, are not excesses or aberrations of liberal life. They are, in your interpretation of them, direct and unavoidable consequences of the very essence of liberal philosophy. Yes, your enemy is the same liberalism that O’Sullivan so gallantly defends — the liberalism of human rights, equality, and individual sovereignty. Liberalism, and with it liberal democracy, is poisoned at the root, in the fundamental and faulty premises of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill. The whole intellectual and political structure created by the Enlightenment is, according to you, only now reaching its full potential, which is also its final undoing. You have your own version of the end of history.
You are not original or alone in your post-liberalism and your counter-Enlightenment. We have heard similarly hostile judgments about liberalism, and about modernity, and about the Enlightenment tradition, since the beginning of liberalism itself. Today they can be found in the works of academic anti-liberals such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Adrian Vermeule, and Patrick Deneen. Liberalism’s cardinal sin, they claim, was Locke’s concept of the “state of nature” — a hypothetical condition of perfect liberty, pre-political and pre-social, to which every human being aspires. But in the course of history various forms of governments, aided by religion, have imposed upon this naturally free human being piles of arbitrary restrictions and obligations that hamper and distort his natural capacities. To liberate the human individual and allow him to reach his full potential, every form of human association, every stricture and obligation, needs to be rationally examined, reduced to actual necessities, and legitimized by popular consent — the hypothetical “social contract.” In your view and the view of other antiliberals, this was a revolutionary idea that struck at tyranny — but also destroyed everything that was good and useful in the pre-liberal and pre-modern world.
In order to fulfil its goals, liberalism, according to the account of the post-liberals, became the fierce enemy of the intricate network of traditional interhuman relations, “social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and practices that had existed prior to the emergence of the new political system,” of the very concept of human rootedness and continuity. Nothing old was allowed to stay in place. Everything had to be invented anew. Nothing was to be accepted on faith, except perhaps liberalism’s own holy creed, which includes the concepts of innate human equality and inalienable human rights, which you and your comrades denounce as an absurdity without philosophical or theological justification.
According to this narrative, which you repeat almost verbatim, liberalism is in a state of constant and relentless war against the remaining bastions of tradition — local communities, the family, and religion — replacing them with its own artificial constructs. Freedoms needed to be regulated, lest they interfere with other freedoms. Liberalism benefitted from a reluctant and misguided need to be led to the light. Hence its ever-intensifying social engineering, its justifications of the coercive function of a supposedly minimal state — its continuous politicization of, and interference with, all aspects of human life, including the most private ones. Instead of the “natural” self-discipline and restraint that reigned in the pre-modern world, which was accepted, apparently without objection, by grateful members of all classes and estates, we got a multiplicity of laws and regulations imposed by distant, anonymous institutions. This process, started over two centuries ago, is yielding more and more dreary results — “absurd” feminist ideology, sexual candor and freedom, unlimited rights to abortion, genderism, euthanasia, and legislation against domestic violence and hate speech, which allow “further drastic intervention by government and the courts in family life, the media, public institutions, and schools.” Oh, and also the “transnational” homosexual movement that has grown so influential that one can no longer entertain a “harmless” “faggot joke.” (You actually said that!)
Liberalism, in your intimidating and exaggerated view of it, is a hyper-ideology that coopts both the right and the left: welfare state advocates and free market fundamentalists, identitarians and globalists, radical environmentalists and greedy industrialists — they all bow to the same liberal idol. Gathered in its temple “the socialists and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism.” (Where are the bold, free spirits ready to defend racism, sexism, homophobia, and the rest? You know exactly where they are.)
Tolerance and pluralism are also liberal ruses. “One simply cannot put a Christian, a Muslim, a socialist, and a conservative into an individualistic/egalitarian framework and expect them to be Christian, Muslim, a socialist, or conservative in the standard sense of the word,” you instruct. “Two loyalties — one particular to one’s own community, and the other to an infinitely open system — cannot be reconciled.” If two loyalties seem too many to you, dear professor, then you know precious little about the complexity and the richness of actual human identity. Moreover, the individualistic and egalitarian framework is probably the only framework in which you can safely put such different people together. Communities that exclude loyalty to other communities, or even limit contacts with those outside the community, do exist, but they are a rarity rather than a rule, and they are certainly not a model of social peace. The liberal framework, by contrast, tolerates and protects such exclusive communities, as long as they do not interfere with other communities or do something nasty to their children. Consider the flourishing in liberal America of the Amish, who are much praised by Patrick Deneen.
In your view, freedom is a limited commodity that should be meted out judiciously. Some people clearly deserve more of it than others. Citing Aristotle, you remind us that some of us are born to be slaves and some of us to be masters. You contend that by extending freedom to some groups we must take it away from others. This does not add to the general pool of freedom. “Imposing the liberal system of freedom,” you complain, “requires that the disadvantaged receive more free space while the privileged have a certain amount of it taken away from them.” (I am reminded of Anatole France’s ironic observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” And also of your utterly unironic observation that “it would be true to say that both a beggar and a Rockefeller, if left alone, would have exactly the same freedom to sleep rough or spend their vacation in Hawaii….”) All this, you say, leads to social engineering, “for instance upgrading women and blacks while restraining patriarchy,” just as “encouraging homosexuals has meant limiting what has been called ‘the monopoly’ of heterosexuals in all areas of life.” You have a strange way with empathy. I conclude that in your view it is better to leave the advantaged and the disadvantaged exactly as they are.
In your account, liberalism is an aggressive and expansionist force. It moves forward “relentlessly,” “annihilates internal criticism,” “hunts down old, incorrect rights,” “ruthlessly imposes liberal-democratic patterns on everything and everyone.” It conquers new territories “as if under a single well-structured and well-organized command following a superbly devised strategy.” Very frightening! Liberalism lures and corrupts by its false vision of an easy life — entitlements without obligations, no striving for moral merits, no need to justify claims, dignity possessed without moral achievement, by the very fact of being born. As a result, the denizens of liberal democracies have more and more rights but less and less freedom, which naturally breeds alienation and anomie. Despite its apparent vibrancy, therefore, life in a liberal democracy is lackluster and dull. Liberal art has been dehumanized; its literature is “speaking about nothing”; the rhetoric of diversity is “masking expanding uniformity.” In the liberal world “there is neither conversation nor poetry.” (Where have you lived?) Luckily, however, the whole liberal project is nearing its end. Liberalism’s energies are almost spent, and it is entering a final crisis — which is entirely its own fault.
It is certainly true that in the name of liberalism we must allow, and even encourage, the criticism of liberalism — and so I hasten to say that it was indeed unfortunate that in 2019 your lecture at the Alexander Hamilton Forum at Middlebury College was canceled after student protests. That is emphatically not the liberal way. Freedom of speech is always a two-way street. The more of it there is, the better prepared we are to respond to our opponents. (I understand that eventually you were able to speak to a political science class at Middlebury.) You are also right to caution against accusing everybody who takes issue with liberal democracy of crypto-fascism. But your own work does not make it easy to enforce such a distinction. It is hard to ignore some of its disturbing, indeed odious themes — the rejection of individual human rights, the repudiation of tolerance, the dream of an organic and homogenous Gemeinschaft with little room for ethnic, religious, or sexual minorities.
I detect something personal, something pre-intellectual, in your denunciations of liberal democracy — a visceral recoil from its uncontrollable scope and variety. It seems to make you profoundly anxious. You write that your doubts about liberal democracy started during your first trips to the West in 1970, when you discovered that liberals were reluctant to condemn communism in unambiguous terms. Was that the main thing that you noticed about the West? Your observation, by the way, was incorrect: many of the most ferocious Western adversaries of communism were liberals. But the hesitation that you detected in certain left-wing quarters made you speculate, and you came up with a theory: that there are deep affinities between the two systems. And this led you to the wild conclusion that liberalism sets itself the same goals that communism does. Both are future-oriented and both are “progressive,” that is, both promise the constant betterment of the human condition — at a price, of course. Both are engaged in intense social engineering and social coercion to create nothing less than a new society and a new human being. Both are hostile to communities, families, and religions. (Though for you only one religion really matters.) Both are millennarian cults that strive for the ultimate victory, for the apotheosis of history.
Yet liberalism is worse than communism, in your view, because it is more clever: it achieves its goals without resorting to overt coercion, to anything as coarse as the Gulag and the KGB. It even allows you to publish your anti-liberal books! (Have you ever read Herbert Marcuse?) Liberalism is so insidious that, unlike communism, it has never openly claimed to struggle towards some ultimate future of harmony and bliss, for the sake of which even genocidal atrocities are justified. Unlike communism, which is so obvious, liberalism never maintained that its vision of history has been scientifically, that is unquestionably, proven and beyond discussion. Yet you are not fooled. You have decoded the reality beneath the appearances. You know that we must await the hour when the mask will fall, and the totalitarian nature of liberal democracy will become visible to all.
If this is the truth that you have spent the best part of your career proving, I pity you. But again I must wonder what is eating at you. During you first visits to the West, you must have stumbled among the post-1968 leftists. This was practically inevitable. I remember my own first visit to the West — to London — in 1969, in the sophomore year of my English studies. In order to obtain a passport and a permit to travel, one had to produce a notarized invitation from someone abroad who would solemnly promise to pay for your upkeep. Who would take such a risk? Unless you had close and generous family in the West, you had to find a person, a friend of a friend, sometimes a total stranger, to sign the papers, with the silent understanding that it was a fiction and that you will not be a burden. In my experience, the people most likely to do so were the rebellious leftist types who, not unlike us, found a thrill in flaunting bureaucratic regulations. They were the curious ones who came backpacking to Eastern Europe to check it out for themselves. They visited our student clubs, came to our drinking parties, engaged in endless discussions, and invited us to backpack across their countries. Once we got there, they sometimes let us sleep on the floor in their dingy apartments with their Che and Mao posters. They were totally misguided in their politics, but they were awfully nice people. They were wrong, but they were free.
I still remember my exhilaration when I set foot in London. Raised in a rather conservative and overprotective Polish family, I found myself for several eventful weeks completely on my own, immersed in a world that was strange but oddly recognizable — dense, vivid, constantly throwing me off balance yet never letting me fall. I walked through posh and shabby neighborhoods, sat with hippies in Hyde Park, watched multigenerational Indian families picnicking on the grass and little African boys practicing cricket on the pitch. I followed with amusement a march of somber-faced bearded members of the Young Communist League of London. I hitchhiked in a tiny car packed with jolly itinerants who must have been British travelers, and I stayed with hospitable Ukrainian emigres whose wartime past I preferred not to investigate.
It was hardly a vacation. I came with a hundred pounds in my pocket — a fortune, if you had to buy it on the black market. I slept in strange, unhealthy places. I washed dishes in pubs and painted houseboats on the Thames. I worked on a demolition site supervised by a Polish foreman, who showed the most extraordinary disregard for his workers’ safety. All the time I entertained the absurd idea that absolutely nothing bad could happen to me because this was the world is as it should be. I was naive, of course, and I probably put myself in a lot of danger, but nothing bad happened and I returned to Poland with a clear idea of what the “normal world” is. I decided to recreate it internally, or in the close circle of my friends. We were not rebels, dissidents, conspirators. We were just ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives, that is, to express ourselves freely without nervously looking around, to possess “forbidden” knowledge as if it were the most natural thing. Once, on a bus in Warsaw, a stranger reproached me for reading in plain sight a book of unmistakably samizdat provenance. I looked up at him in genuine astonishment. What could be wrong with reading a book?
Perhaps my approval of liberal democracy — for us it was simply democracy — was also pre-intellectual. I kindled instinctively to it. Political choices, as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert once remarked, are frequently a matter of taste.
What strikes me most in today’s antiliberal narratives is their conviction that for over two centuries Western civilization flourished (and sometimes withered and flourished again) in a fog of misconceptions. To claim that everything humanity did in that vibrant, creative, often turbulent era was the result of a huge philosophical error, of certain wrong premises laid down in the eighteenth century by a handful of philosophers, is to deny the abundance of history and human agency. Were we so easily fooled, and for so long? And what would happen if we really tried to undo that fantastic fallacy and returned to the truth, returned to… what exactly?
You blame the philosophers of the eighteenth century for their revolutionary theories. I, too, have a reverence for ideas, but one does not have to be a Marxist to see that some non-ideological factors played a role in the great historical transformation. The history of ideas is not the whole of history. There is also the history of economics, society, technology, science, human geography. Momentous changes were happening in all those realms at that time. They caused political upheavals and religious wars. Sometimes the ideas came later. Locke wrote in the aftermath of Cromwell’s Civil War, the regicide of Charles I, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution that ushered in constitutional monarchy in Britain. His philosophy expressed what was probably on the minds of many people. Liberal political principles started to take root, first in the Anglo-Saxon world and then in all corners of the Western world, not as a doctrine imposed from above, but as a response to the demands of the emerging new world. It was not the only response, but its success was hardly a matter of historical accident or of the machinations of “liberal elites.”
The people whom we call the fathers of liberal thought were not always the most rigorous thinkers and they did not usually exert themselves too much to create elegant, abstract philosophical systems. (The conservative thought of the same period did not exactly cover itself in rigorous glory, either.) Liberal thought draws from many, sometimes contrasting, sources: anthropological optimism (man is rational and capable of freedom) and anthropological pessimism (man is endlessly corruptible), rationalism, empiricism, religion (mostly Protestant Christianity), natural law, a dash of utilitarianism. Liberal philosophers, especially those in the English tradition, often smoothed out the seams by referring to observable facts and to common sense. Bertrand Russell (definitely not one of your heroes) saw this piecemeal, empirical approach of the English liberal thinkers as their great advantage. Liberalism’s loose structure leaves a lot of room to improvise, and it requires constant thinking, debate, compromise, and partial solutions. There is no political doctrine that provides less immediate and total gratification than liberalism. Moreover, I cannot name a single liberal politician who would quote Locke, or Mill, or Kant while proposing, or opposing, a policy or a law. Doctrinal purity is the least of their concerns. Their — our — liberalism is a framework of general ideas that supports a system of constantly evolving institutions, procedures, and legal solutions — a matter of messy practice rather than immaculate dogma.
Many of the ills of contemporary liberal democracies that you list are real, and they are subject to constant liberal debate, in which common sense sometimes wins. Many of your allegations are familiar anti-liberal exaggerations, sometimes repeated in good faith also by liberals, and it is impossible not to notice that they almost inevitably come down to sex. You and your ilk peddle the strange view that liberals are at bottom hedonists, inveterate pleasure-seekers, philosomatoi, body-lovers, obsessed with sexual indulgence. At this point you put down Plato, Aristotle, and Mill and reach for dusty old issues of Playboy. The emancipation of the body from “the old moral teachings” and the triumph of sexuality has annihilated, in your view, “all hitherto existing moral hierarchies that made sexuality subservient to higher goals.” Sex has been “transformed into a powerful instrument for creating collective ideologies that regulate life’s most private aspect,” with two great victories: “legal abortion and homosexual rights.” Same-sex unions are “as good or as bad as the group marriage of several men and several women,” and equally undermine our attachment to the monogamous unions of one man and one woman.
Who are these libertines? I wonder where you actually encountered this orgy of license and abandon, this wholesale rejection of the “traditional” family. In Krakow? I must have been hanging out with the wrong crowd. My own experience of liberal life has made me think that a medieval peasant must surely have had more fun, including carnal fun, than my constantly overworked, stressed, hurried, deadline-obsessed friends from the educated middle class. The 1960s, please remember, were a long time ago; we are no longer young and that world (insofar as you portray it at all correctly) is gone. There is something, well, queer about the way sex keeps coming back as the perfect metonymy of everything that has gone wrong in liberal democracy. Isn’t a sex-obsessed analysis of society an intellectual kind of sex addiction?
Can a society survive without virtue, excellence of character, self-control, and a sense of duty? Obviously not, and the liberal world is no exception. Not long ago, in these pages, Samuel Moyn wrote about the central role of duties in liberal theory and practice. That was not only because duties are necessary to safeguard our rights, but also because rights are necessary if we want to dispense our duties properly. Moyn observes that in recent decades the subject of duties seems to have fallen out of liberal discourse. In my own experience, the situation “on the ground” may not be so dire. The spirit of civic self-organization, activism, and voluntarism — all requiring a strong sense of duty — is as alive as ever. A free and self-reliant individual seeking his own version of eudaimonia, or flourishing, does not need to be a selfish hedonist. (Call me provincial, but I do not know a single person who would fit that description.) It is past time for you, and other sentimental communitarian post-liberals, to notice that individuals form associations for common purposes. They belong to groups and they support causes. They are generally not Dionysian monads. You would be surprised at how often the pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of the happiness of the other.
The spirit of uncoerced duty, of excellence of character, of a willingness to sacrifice — virtue in the most classical sense — is on plain view in Ukraine, which is fighting for its liberal life. So is barbarity and the viciousness of liberalism’s enemies. We are witnessing the perennial danse macabre of the best in humankind with the worst. I now see, on live television, pictures from my parents’ war stories: women and children lumbering through fields of broken stone and glass, families huddling in shelters, civilians of all ages training for combat against professional soldiers, housewives storing Molotov cocktails. It is Warsaw in 1939, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, with some striking anachronisms. The neighborhoods in Ukrainian cities that have been leveled by Russian bombs look exactly like the neighborhoods in which I grew up. The same dreary socialist classicism, the same anonymous concrete apartment buildings, now in ruins. The exodus also looks familiar, just like my future mother must have looked walking out of Warsaw after the fall of the Uprising — women and children, vulnerable and scared — they are still walking, this time with roller suitcases and cheerful school backpacks. They stream into all the neighboring countries, but mainly into Poland. Poland has accepted over two million refugees. To put it in proportion, it is as if twenty-four million people descended on the United States within a few weeks. But this is not a relationship between a victim and a protector, between a supplicant and a charitable helper. After all, Ukrainians also do something for Poles and the rest of Europe. They are our protectors. Taking care of their women and children is the least we can do. That, too, seems to be obvious to Poles — Poles and Ukrainians, together.
There is a lot of close, entangled, and mostly unhappy history between the two nations. An intimate bond often led to bloodshed, most recently during the horrid Volhynian Massacres in 1942, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was brutally cleansing ethnic Poles from Ukrainian lands in the hope of establishing a Ukrainian state under Hitler’s protection. (Hitler had different plans.) Between 50,000 and 100,000 thousand Poles, mostly civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered, as well as many Jews, and also Ukrainians who tried to protect their neighbors. Poles retaliated in kind, killing 10,000 to 30,000 Ukrainians. The Germans, who occupied the territories at that time, stood by and watched. “Hatred grew into the hearts and poisoned the blood of brothers,” wrote the nineteenth-century novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz about an earlier epic bloodletting, the Khmelnitsky uprising in 1648. There seems to be no trace of that poison now.
Am I like the hapless, pedantic Settembrini in The Magic Mountain, haggling, on the eve of the Great War, with the Hegelian-Marxist anti-liberal Naphta, a Polish Jew schooled by the Jesuits in Spain? Settembrini stands for reason and enlightenment. He is a decent and likable man, but Thomas Mann, his creator, equipped both of the interlocutors in the grand debate with telling human defects. Naphta is beguiled by death and is clearly uncertain about his identity, including the Jewish identity that he tries to conceal. Settembrini, a man of great passion, fears the power of human emotions and tries to push them out of his world. He wants to ignore everything that is irrational, dark, dangerous, or sublime in the human soul. He finds music politically suspect because it lifts the spirit too high, beyond the reaches of reason. Obviously he does not want to hear about metaphysics.
In this regard he exemplifies a liberal characteristic that is often criticized: its preference for “the mean” at the expense of greatness, its indifference — or hostility — to metaphysical strivings. Man’s spirituality is not one of liberalism’s concerns. And so it can appear small and pedestrian and boring. In his review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell noted that while capitalism and socialism (Orwell’s creed was democratic socialism) promises mainly a gradual improvement of material conditions, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini offered their followers the rapture of pain and the ecstasy of struggle. Hence their immediate, and disastrous, appeal. One can object that Churchill, too, promised “blood, sweat, and tears,” but they were not his ultimate goals — they were a way to win the comforts and the banalities of peace.
There are those who claim that Vladimir Putin also harbors such an authoritarian grandeur — that, influenced by the ideas of a twentieth-century Russian fascist mystic named Ivan Illyin, he truly believes in a celestial and divine soul of Russia, and in its holy mission to convert and sanctify the rest of the world. Myself, I think this flatters him with too much spiritual depth, but it is indisputable that metaphysical language is present in Putin’s propaganda. If only Ukrainians, seduced by liberal materialism, would renounce their Western error and return to the holy Russian womb! This may require a dose of purifying violence, a common sacrifice to restore a common spirit.
The mystical streak runs deep in Russian political tradition. In 1831, when Russian troops were bombarding Warsaw and finishing off the Polish-Lithuanian anti-Russian uprising that inspired (among other things) Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” the great Russian poet Fyedor Tyutchev waxed metaphysical in comparing Poland to Iphigenia as she was sacrificed by Agamemnon “for the breath of fair winds”:
Pierced by your brother’s arrow,
fulfilling destiny’s pronouncement,
you fell, single-tribed eagle,
onto the purifying fire!
Believe the word of the Russian people:
your ashes will be preserved by us in sanctity,
and our general freedom,
like the phoenix, will be reborn in them!
(translated by Frank Jude)
The Poles were not impressed by such grandiose sanctification, and neither, it seems, are the Ukrainians. Governments should stay out of transcendental preoccupations. Imperfect human laws have more quotidian tasks. One thing is certain about liberalism: it does not lead to religious wars. But having said this, I wish Settembrini would allow himself to enjoy music. It would, ironically enough, make him a better liberal.
In the days of our youth in Poland, some of us dared to challenge our “socialist civics” teachers by asking an impudent question. How come “bourgeois democracy,” the infamous system of exploitation and suppression of the working class, has not yet succumbed to the inner contradictions described by Marx? Whence its durability? Why do its citizens seem to be thriving materially and culturally — with better cars, better food, better movies, and generally with a more colorful, rich, varied, and exciting existence than in our gray and ascetic world? With communist parties legal, active, and sometimes even participating in governments, citizens could easily send the bourgeois parties packing.
As a rule, the answer that we were given was curt and threatening. It was that we had succumbed to Western propaganda. We watched too many Western movies and listened to too much Western music. In fact, they told us, the West is nothing like that. There is unemployment, and racism, and widespread crime. What we mistake for the good life is a materialistic façade meant to deceive and enslave people, to turn their attention away from their loneliness, their alienation, their inner poverty. For Western freedoms are meaningless. The system owes its continuity to its control of everything, including human minds. This is what Marx called “false consciousness” — a deceptive system of ideas, beliefs, and habits that creates a veil of obfuscation which prevents people from recognizing their true condition.
Today’s anti-liberal criticism on the right accepts this Marxist narrative almost without modification. The resilience of liberal democracy troubles the “post-liberals,” and so they predict its imminent downfall. But still they need to explain its apparent resilience, its continued attractiveness. Why does liberal democracy enjoy the support of the very people whom it has purportedly enslaved? Why are its fundamental and systemic flaws not more obvious to those who live with them daily? Why are millions still trekking from illiberal countries into liberal countries, and not the other way round? You, Professor Legutko, admit that “alternative political models have not been drawn or even seriously considered, and the effectiveness of the regime is still impressively high.” But why?
Your answer sounds oddly familiar to people such as ourselves, who were educated in communist schools. You admit that liberal democracy is “perfectly tailored to the aspirations of the people inhabiting it,” and that the human model that it promotes “is perfectly tailored to the opportunities offered by the political system and to the aspirations enhanced by it.” It would seem, then, that free people have created a system that suits them best. But this cannot be, since it is a wrong system — and so this can only mean that the people living in this system are not really free, or do not know how to use their freedom. How can they be free? They have departed too much from the ideals taught by the ancient philosophers and religions. They are too far gone in the liberal lie. And so they are in urgent need of being saved from themselves. Yes, false consciousness! Nothing here is real. Everything is an illusion. Everything is its opposite. As you write, “pluralism means monopoly; diversity — conformity; tolerance — censorship; openness — ideological rigidity.” Our teachers, and Orwell too, would have been proud.
You wonder why, after the fall of communism, Poland and the rest of East Central Europe, “as if charmed by powerful but invisible political magicians,” settled for liberal democracy. After all, the huge moral mobilization represented by the overthrow of communism should have culminated in something more profound and spiritual, something that would contain “classical metaphysics, morality, and Christian religion,” something that would have reflected Poland’s unique historical experience. You see post-communist Poland as a slavish imitation of the West induced by an intellectual inertia, by a “contagious” concept of historical inevitability, or, worse, as the result of brainwashing by Poland’s “liberal elites” and conniving by former communists eager to establish a system that would allow them to retain some of their privileges. (Where else would they feel at home if not under a regime similar to communism?) But you do not despair. In your view, the opportunity for redemption may not be entirely lost. People are waking up and voting against the liberals in Hungary and Poland, and soon perhaps in the rest of the region. The trend may even have pan-European consequences. Anti-liberal, or post-liberal, or illiberal parties in your part of the world — the only such parties that actually hold power — may give a much-needed boost to their comrades in West. Some of your fellow anti-liberal politicians even speak openly about Poland’s mission of re-Christianizing Europe.
Not sharing your misgivings about liberal democracy, I see the post-communist transformation of Poland as both natural and welcome. It is true that the struggle against communism in Poland, and probably in other East-Central European countries, appeared to many people as more of a moral battle than a political one. Yet if high-minded and general language was preferred by the anti-communist dissidents, it was partly, but not entirely, for strategic reasons. After Solidarity’s initial and quite unexpected successes — the strikes spreading like wildfire and forcing the government into an unprecedented dialogue — there was confusion about what exactly the workers should demand. At first their postulates were mainly economic and labor-related, but under the influence of opposition intellectuals they gradually expanded into the social and cultural sphere. It was quite obvious that the proposed changes would gravely curtail the communist monopoly of power. It was hard to predict, however, how far the changes would go and what the new hybrid arrangements would look like. It is safe to assume that most Poles, if asked directly, would have said that they wanted to live in a “democracy of the Western type,” but in those days such an outcome seemed a rather remote possibility. Something unfamiliar was happening, something that should not have been possible, and it was better not to be too specific in one’s plans, or even in one’s dreams.
As a result, a language of lofty imponderables dominated the public discourse: truth, dignity, honesty, respect, solidarity, fraternity, national identity, and of course “Christian values,” were affirmed loudly by nearly everybody, including anti-clericalists. The Church was a much-needed ally in the struggle, providing spiritual and material assistance, and liberals responded with good will. (There was even a rash of baptisms and church weddings among people who had lived happily without them.) On the liberal left’s side, the textbook of this rapprochement was Adam Michnik’s book The Church and the Left, which appeared in 1977 (and years later in English). But this may have given the wrong impression about the intellectual and political realities. For some Western conservative commentators, such as George Weigel in The Final Revolution, published in 1992, the Church’s struggle with communism was a millenarian battle with the “tyranny of politics.” It was what Weigel saw as “the human turn to the good, to the truly human — and, ultimately, to God.” You would have thought that Solidarity’s program was wholly cribbed from the Sermon on the Mount, that it was less about the form of government than about the shape of the human soul.
After the crackdown on the anti-communist opposition and the declaration of martial law in 1981, it was no longer possible to believe that the system would be vanquished or transformed by righteousness alone. Something new, as yet unknown but quite specific, would have to appear in its place. In the midst of the repressions, there was a pervasive sense that by resorting to military force the system has written its own death sentence. It had no more arguments left. It was a junta, and juntas do not last forever. “You can win a fight with a bayonet but you cannot sit on it,” was the slogan of the day.
The breakthrough in 1989, and the quick collapse of the remnants of communist power, confronted Solidarity and other anticommunist movements in the region with the urgent task of translating their victory into political institutions. Ideological differences, kept in check under communism and martial law, came to the surface. There was, indeed, an abundance of ideas. Should Solidarity constitute itself as a political party? One of many, or perhaps, at least at first, the only one, if strictly pledged to internal democracy? Or should the new dispensation be based on local citizens’ councils or worker’s committees, like those that ran strikes and negotiated deals with the authorities before martial law? Should the government-controlled economy be privatized, or marketized and kept in the hands of state, or ceded over to workers’ collectives? There were also the programs of radical nationalists, and Catholic integralists, and monarchists. There was even the Party of Beer Lovers, with its own utopia of replacing vodka with good beer as the staple of Polish social gatherings. In many circles, mainly on the left, there was a longing for something called “anti-politics,” which the Hungarian writer Georgy Konrad defined as the domination of civil society over the political elites, or, in his own words, “the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; a counterpower that cannot take power and does not wish to. Power it has already, here and now, by reasons of its moral and cultural weight.” But finally, to the disappointment of some and the relief of many, it came down to parliamentary democracy and constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights. Liberal democracy triumphed not by the suppression of the alternatives or the clandestine plots of the elites, but the way it always triumphs — by being the most acceptable, or the least objectionable, to the largest number, including its own opponents.
What happened later was more problematic, owing not to liberalism’s intrinsic shortcomings but to specific circumstances in East Central Europe. These were countries with very weak liberal traditions. They had only a scarce familiarity with the problems that liberalism elsewhere had to work through, sometimes repeatedly, during its history. Liberal democracy came to Poland and other post-communist countries fully cooked and ready to serve in a late twentieth century version, to the absolute delight of many and the uneasiness of equally numerous others. The former group had long cultivated their “Western” identity in defiance of communist political and cultural pressures. The latter group had responded to the same pressures by falling back on traditions, extended families, national history, and the Catholic Church. They also considered themselves Europeans, but their concept of Europe was sometimes vague and antiquated. Under communism both groups coexisted, treating each other’s peculiarities with a good dose of forbearance. Under democracy, they often found themselves on the opposite sides of political divisions, treating each other with growing impatience and hostility. They were free to fight bitterly over the high political and cultural stakes.
Culturally conservative Poles were disturbed by some of the manifestations of instant political liberalism — gay pride parades and women’s pro-abortion protests (often under deliberately provocative and offensive slogans), sexual education in schools, including instruction about gender identity and non-standard sexual orientations, and harsh media attacks on the Church for its sexual scandals and political overreach. The response of the liberals was often contemptuous and dismissive: this is how things are done in the civilized world, end of discussion, and whoever does not agree is a bigot, a chauvinist, a religious fanatic, or a moron. (Students of contemporary American liberalism will recognize this phenomenon.) “The nation is so stupid!” I have heard that on many occasions from my liberal friends. It always reminds me of Brecht’s famous poem “The Solution”: wouldn’t it be easier if you dissolved the people and elected a new one, more to your liking?
One should not underestimate the role of economic dislocations after the collapse of the communist planned economy, which often overlapped with a sense of cultural marginalization. The main factor of liberal instability in Poland today seems to be cultural rather than economic. Quite a lot of Poles live happily, comfortably, and a bit overconfidently in the modern, and sometimes post-modern, culture. But quite a lot of Poles are ill at ease in it. Those two cultural constituencies grow more and more distant; they do not talk to each other and they have no common language. As a result, the fabric of the relatively young Polish liberal democracy is fraying. This development, of course, is not unknown in the West. The “basket of deplorables” language is carefully avoided in public speech, but the contemptuous sentiment persists. In this sense, Eastern Europe may indeed hold a lesson for the West as an example of a problem that needs to be acknowledged before it grows too big to solve.
Illiberal parties in East-Central Europe benefit from this dilemma by stirring and channeling social fears and resentments. How illiberal are they? Both the Fidesz Party in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland have solidly liberal antecedents. Fidesz, under the leadership of the young democratic activist Victor Orban, was the hope of Hungarian liberalism in the 1990s. The Law and Justice party harkens from the more conservative wing of the Solidarity movement. Their drift to the far right was largely opportunistic — the filling of a political vacuum left by a series of missteps by the left and left-centrist governments that preceded them. They position themselves as defenders of “European Christian traditions” against the purported threat of “Islamization” and “neopaganism.” They present themselves as protectors of the family from the double threats of feminism and LGBTQ “ideology.” They are morbidly oversensitive about national sovereignty and have strong anti-EU elements. At home they try to curtail opposition media — in Hungary much more successfully than Poland — by financial means and by manipulating media ownership laws. Most importantly, they tamper with judicial independence by packing constitutional tribunals and supreme courts with political sympathizers, and defying the European (though not American) tradition of a depoliticized judicial nomination process.
Yet the opposition in both countries are far from impotent. Independent opposition-leaning media remain vocal, especially in Poland, and vigorous political debate is continuing. Non-governmental organizations of various stripes remain active, and fundamental human rights are generally protected. Even “reformed” constitutional tribunals and courts sometimes decide against the governments’ policies. National and local elections are conducted regularly, and international observers deem them generally free and fair, although marred by the politicization of the media and the governments’ deployment of administrative resources on behalf of their preferred candidates. There are no political prisoners.
The continuing electoral success of those parties, despite their impressive list of failures and the glaring lack of charisma in their leaders, is helped in no small degree by the divisions in the opposition, which in Poland still fails to realize that dismissing forty percent of the electorate — the Law and Justice voters — as uncivilized and dispensable is not a winning strategy. It is laughable to credit these tacky right-wing parties with some bold vision of a new post-liberal order, but it is equally wrong to present them as fully authoritarian, dictatorial, or even fascistic. These are seriously imperfect democracies, but it is offensive and impertinent to compare them to Putin’s Russia or Lukashenka’s Belarus.
And yet I do not wish to make light of the concerns that the rise of illiberalism provokes in these countries and in the wider world. There is a historical basis for alarm: the liberal traditions in these countries are weak, and there is a lack of respectful and patient debate about liberalism’s problems and paradoxes. (Some, of course, are too far gone in anti-liberal hatred and ignorance for any civilized debate.) I am quite confident that no one in today’s Poland would deliberately relinquish the liberal freedoms that they have come to take for granted. But many Poles may fail to distinguish between liberalism’s core elements and its accidental, transitory, and debatable manifestations. They may watch with satisfaction their governments’ creeping and calculated antiliberal interventions without realizing that sooner or later their own freedoms may be at stake. Cultural dissonances can push them beyond the point of no return. This is also in evidence today, for slightly different reasons, in some “mature” liberal democracies. Putin has been exploiting our unaddressed cultural dissonances for quite some time.
My dear professor, we are already quite far from an academic philosophical discussion. But you are far from being a disinterested seeker of truth. You are a politician representing your party in the European Parliament, a party that is slowly and methodically dismantling the liberal checks on power. You are, to quote Marx again, a philosopher who wants to change the world instead of just interpreting it, to lead us boldly “beyond the liberal-democratic horizon.” But where, exactly, do you wish to lead us?
Revolutionary anti-liberals of old were quite specific in their remedies. Liberalism is finished, it’s communism or fascism now: this was the anti-liberal refrain of the 1930s. Today’s anti-liberals are more cautious. When their books approach their conclusions, they grow vague and elusive. No, they concede, they cannot propose an alternative. Not yet. But an alternative will emerge and it will be a good one. It will preserve all the good sides of liberalism and erase all the bad ones. It will be something entirely new, because liberalism cannot be improved, it can only be replaced. And the new dispensation may turn out to be an old one, a restoration of some kind. It will teach us true freedom by re-establishing its proper meaning, by reviving traditional virtues, by reintroducing the metaphysical dimension to our social life, by returning us to the long-forgotten ambition of achieving spiritual greatness by political means. Your American colleague Deneen lamely admits that the ideal post-liberal system may one day be called… liberal. In the meantime, let us, the right thinkers, stick together, study the classics, give testimony to the truth, despise the secular modernist liberals, and sooner or later one of us will come up with a heroic idea.
Not to dismiss the appeal of utopian thinking, but once in a while we need to return to the serious world of political reality. In the old days, when our backpacking leftist friends from the West maintained that Soviet communism is not a “true thing,” we pointed out that it is the only real thing. Today, the only real alternative to liberal democracy is illiberal authoritarianism. It seems, in fact, to be on the rise. For years, Putin’s Russia has been playing the same role toward the illiberal parties in Europe that the Soviet Union used to play for the communist parties in Europe. It has been gathering them under its wings, supporting them with money and disinformation campaigns, nudging them into positions most favorable to Putin’s geostrategic plans. (The Polish Law and Justice party seems to be an exception to the rule, despite sometimes echoing some of Putin’s anti-liberal and anti-Western rhetoric. Poles have coddled Orban, and the Polish Prime Minister has met with Le Pen and Salvini, but it is only fair to note that Law and Justice has not joined them in their pro-Russian position.) Like the Soviet Union of old, Putin’s Russia is always on the lookout for the disappointed and the dissatisfied, for clueless fellow-travelers, for useful idiots. And like the Soviet Union of old, it finds them.
Your views, Professor Legutko, and the views of other antiliberals, cannot be discussed in a vacuum. They have concrete consequences. They are used by autocrats who wish to weaken liberal democracy not in order to replace it with something better, but to seize, solidify, and maintain their own power. Their visceral fear of liberal democracy is not philosophical, it is existential. We see this today with the utmost clarity in Ukraine. In a sense, Putin is right. Ukraine does pose a mortal threat to his regime, not because it plans to march on Moscow but because it chooses to pursue its own liberal future. The victory of Ukraine could spell the end of Putinism. And Ukraine’s defeat would trigger truly frightening consequences in Europe and elsewhere. That is why Ukrainians have been fighting our war, a war for the version of history that you would like to cast away. History has not ended, which means that everything is still possible, but at this moment in history it is liberal democracy that has provided us with the largest scope of freedom and the lowest level of coercion in human history. It may also be the only protection we have against the authoritarianism and the autocracy that has reappeared on the historical stage. Old demons are back. It is not the “demon in democracy” that we have reason to fear.
The demon in democracy: you end your book of that peculiar title with a sigh of resignation. Perhaps, you admit, the story of liberal democracy does express the “basic truth about modern man who, after many adventures, downfalls and ascents, exultations and tribulations, after following many chimeras and surrendering to many temptations, finally arrived at the accurate recognition of who he is.” You say it with regret and with disappointment. No further change in our condition will be possible, except for the worse. We have revealed our true nature and its name is mediocrity.
I refuse to succumb to your gloom. During my life as a denizen of liberal democracy I have seen my share of mediocrity, but also enough creativity, and even heroism to believe that our story is far from over. And are there no mediocre people on the post-liberal right? Are you all visionaries and supermen? Anyway, mediocre people, however you condescendingly define them, also have rights and are also worthy of respect. As I write this, the Russian offensive in Ukraine has stalled. Ukraine has been defending itself longer than Poland did in 1939 and will outdo France in 1940. We are in for a long, dark, tense period, with Poland once again on the front line of defense. You and your comrades have nothing to contribute to this defense. It will be won or lost by the moral mettle of Western liberalism. It is the strength of our convictions, the ones that you have haughtily repudiated, which will decide the outcome.
Liberal democracy has won similar confrontations before. I really do not see anything else — certainly not your ugly and illusory post-liberal order — that can take its place.
