Why Populism is Incompatible with Classical Liberalism

From the classical liberal point of view, the populist right is bad because it leads society away from being able to understand the objective truth better. As I’ve argued before, liberalism’s vision of the good life depends on understanding the objective truth better and better over time, thus it can be argued that liberalism’s highest good and ultimate goal is to understand the whole and unbiased objective truth in everything, period. Anything that stands in the way of this is, by definition, liberalism’s enemy. It is because of this that many liberals had such a visceral reaction to the 2010s woke left’s practices of cancel culture and de-platforming. We rightly understood that any compromise in the ability to exercise free speech distorts the marketplace of ideas, and makes discerning the truth harder, if not impossible. 

In the past, I’ve argued that the defining characteristic of populist-right politics is that it relies on emotive messaging, rather than rational persuasion, to gain support for its agenda. This is very harmful to the pursuit of the truth. In order to understand the objective truth in an undistorted way, we need to have a rational and unbiased discourse, and the populist right would not allow that, because they enjoy having controversial social issues heated, unresolved and polarizing, so that they can extract political gain from it. This, alone, makes the populist right enemies of liberals, on a political level. It means that every time a heterodox liberal upholds the populist right’s positions without substantial modification, they are in fact aiding and abetting the enemy.

Besides the incompatibility in the method of pursuing politics, classical liberals and the populist right are actually at war on an even deeper level: many prominent and influential thinkers associated with the populist right have actually openly stated their strong dislike of liberalism, going all the way back to the very beginnings of the classical liberal cannon. They have also not been shy about their intention to bring about a regime change in the West, that would undo liberalism in every part of Western society. Their plan is clear: foment multiple emotionally-driven outrages in society, gain power, and use that power and outrage to implement deeply illiberal and inhumane policies across the board. This means that, right now, the populist right is objectively an even bigger threat to the future of Western liberalism than the woke left ever was.