Liberalism and the simple question that anti-liberals almost never answer

Although some believe that communism is a thing of the past, currently one-fifth of humanity lives under communist dictatorships.

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Perhaps we don't realize what this means: one in five human beings lives under one-party regimes, totalitarian systems where the people have no right to choose their rulers, with tirans who violate human rights and still maintain things like the Laogai, the Chinese version of the Soviet Gulag. Millions of people in these countries long for the freedom that exists in democratic countries, because they already have the terrible misfortune of knowing firsthand the horror of lacking it.

On the other hand, Islam is the majority religion in about 50 of the nearly 200 countries in the world. In many Islamic countries, religious freedom is either nonexistent or severely restricted. Living in one of these countries can be a true ordeal if you are a woman, belong to a religious minority, wish to leave Islam, or are homosexual.

A month ago we talked here about the 50 countries that most persecute Christians. In 15 of those countries, Christians suffer extreme levels of persecution. Five of those 50 countries are communist dictatorships and 37 are Islamic countries.

In case some haven't noticed yet, all this lack of freedom is seeping into the West through two channels: progressivism or "Wokism," which consists of establishing a new, monolithic ideology stemming from far-left ideologies, and a process of Islamization driven by mass immigration originating in Islamic countries. This Islamization is leading to the rise of Islamic extremism in the West, which has already resulted in serious terrorist attacks in several countries.

While these three totalitarian threats, all sharing a hatred of the West—communism, Islamism, and Islamism—loom on our horizon, some Westerners want to convince us that our real problem is liberalism (understood in the Spanish sense, that is, classical liberalism). Reading messages like this, written by left-wing extremists or Islamic fundamentalists, is predictable. What is astonishing is seeing Christians and right-wingers who have accepted that our biggest problem is not this totalitarian threat, which aims to reduce our democracy and freedoms to rubble, but liberalism itself —that is, a political current that defends individual liberty, private enterprise, and the limitation of political power to prevent abuses of power. A current supported by many Christians (I am one of them).

While these three totalitarian threats, all sharing a hatred of the West —communism, Islamism, and Islamism— loom on our horizon, some Westerners want to convince us that our real problem is liberalism. Reading messages like this, written by left-wing extremists or Islamic fundamentalists, is predictable. What is astonishing is seeing Christians and right-wingers who have accepted that our biggest problem is not this totalitarian threat, which aims to reduce our democracy and freedoms to rubble, but rather liberalism—that is, a political current that defends individual liberty, private enterprise, and the limitation of political power to prevent abuses of power. A current supported by many Christians and right-wingers (I am one of them).

If many of those unfortunate enough to live under communist dictatorships and Islamist regimes were to read this, they would surely think we were crazy: Can there really be people who believe that our problem is having freedom and limited power? Anyway, I suppose that's the consequence of having been lucky enough to be born and raised in a free country: sometimes we forget how fortunate we are, and some people think we'd be better off in an illiberal utopia. Europe already experienced two of them in the last century: communism and Nazism. They cost us millions of lives.

I don't know what many anti-liberals have in mind to replace the liberalism they hate so much. And I say I don't know because anti-liberals are very talkative when they speak about what they dislike about liberalism, democracy, and living in a free society, but they become very taciturn when it comes to formulating what political regime they propose, what model of coexistence they aspire to put in place of that evil and diabolical liberalism, and where their proposals have been tested. In fact, there is a simple question that anti-liberals almost never answer: What do you propose as an alternative?

Obviously, if that simple question often goes unanswered, it's for an easy-to-understand reason: telling others that you want a society where someone can end up in prison simply for disagreeing or professing a different religion is something that frightens many people, simply because of a matter of memory.

Liberalism is not only the fruit of an intellectual process within various schools of thought (including renowned Catholic scholastics), but also the result of centuries of harsh lessons learned. Throughout history, many peoples have been subjected to tyrants, whose abuses have generated a weariness that was ultimately embodied in that series of rules called constitutions, whose purpose is to try to curb further abuses by other potential tyrants. If there is one criticism that can be leveled at many liberals today, it is that they have forgotten this fundamental tenet of liberalism, which is to establish safeguards against political power, and not to create armies of bureaucrats to subject our lives to a deluge of absurd regulations.

Of course, the existence of bad liberals doesn't mean liberalism is inherently bad, just as the existence of bad citizens doesn't mean a society is inherently bad. Obviously, there have been and still are bad or inconsistent people in all ideologies, even those that masquerade as virtuous and promise to have the antidote to all the world's ills, demanding in return the sacrifice of our freedoms. The difference between liberalism and utopian ideologies is that the former acknowledges human imperfection, the certainty that there can be no perfect political model—not even liberalism itself claims to be—that can guarantee that no one will attempt to abuse their power.

Winston Churchill was quite right in his famous speech of November 11, 1947: "Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." From this disastrous form of government, which has proven to be, quite simply, the most effective at preventing us from killing each other, I will continue to wait (sitting) for someone to explain a better alternative, if there is one. Because that is another of the great advantages of liberalism: the defense of dialogue. A dialogue that some ideologies reject outright, without further ado, because they are so pernicious that they cannot withstand the slightest contrast with other ideas.

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Original photo: Miltiadis Fragkidis.