How should liberal democracies respond to the rise of right-wing populism? In this timely book, Politicizing Political Liberalism, Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti draw on and extend the influential political theory of John Rawls to provide an original and compelling answer, writes Andrew Shorten.
Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti. Oxford Academic. 2024.
For many people today, liberalism looks to be an exhausted intellectual tradition, with little to offer a political scene increasingly marked by right-wing populists, rising authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding. Badano and Nuti provide a convincing rejoinder, arguing that liberal political theory – and specifically the theory of political liberalism associated with the late American political philosopher John Rawls – contains underappreciated resources for responding to our current predicament, including by supporting a robust political project of democratic self-defence.
At the heart of Badano and Nuti’s book are recommendations for a series of containment measures intended to counter the threat right-wing populists pose to liberal democratic institutions. The idea that certain views and perspectives require “containment” comes directly from Rawls himself
who memorably but opaquely remarked that the presence of “unreasonable” ideas, such as religious fundamentalisms, “gives us the practical task of containing them – like war and disease – so that they do not overturn political justice” (Political Liberalism, 1993). The task Badano and Nuti set themselves is to think about what this “practical task” requires for the kind of right-wing populism currently in the ascendancy in many countries today.
[Badano and Nuti] suggest acting when there are signs that liberal democracy is deconsolidating because a sizeable minority of citizens, and the politicians representing them, no longer believe in liberal democratic values and are attracted to authoritarian alternatives.
Helpfully, they divide the measures they recommend into three broad categories. First are duties falling on citizens themselves, who are expected to put pressure on friends and family members tempted by populism and illiberal ideas. Second are duties specifically for political partisans, who are required to refrain from embracing populist or illiberal political agendas and are asked to act strategically so as to transform the dominant political ideas and categories circulating in society. Third are duties for municipal governments and local authorities, who are encouraged to both refrain from co-operating with illiberal public policies emanating from central government and to nourish prefigurative political projects that attempt to foster social relations in the present that resemble those of a future well-ordered liberal society. Badano and Nuti pepper their discussion of each of the duties they propose with a blend of illustrative real-world examples and appropriate social scientific evidence.
Apart from the measures themselves, two things make Badano and Nuti’s project both useful and distinctive. First, it identifies a category of democratic self-defence measures that has been neglected by most other comparable theories. These theories tend to fall into one of two camps. On one side are advocates of militant democracy who support “hard” curtailment measures, such as restricting basic liberal freedoms of speech and association for racists and fascists. On the other side are liberals who recommend “soft” measures, such as school programmes to encourage children to develop the civic virtues of tolerance and civility. Badano and Nuti’s own original recommendations fall towards the softer end of this spectrum but cover a more diffuse set of agents and apply in a wider range of cases. In particular, unlike the hard containment measures recommended by militant democrats, which are justified only when there is an immediate threat to the perseverance of liberal democratic institutions, Badano and Nuti’s softer containment measures are triggered at an earlier stage. They suggest acting when there are signs that liberal democracy is deconsolidating because a sizeable minority of citizens, and the politicians representing them, no longer believe in liberal democratic values and are attracted to authoritarian alternatives. Consequently, the containment measures they describe are supposed to apply to people living today in countries like Italy, Poland, Hungry, the US and elsewhere.
When it comes to the duty falling on ordinary citizens to put pressure on their friends and colleagues expressing populist or illiberal ideas, one might wonder about how effective most of us will be at containing such ideas
The second distinctive feature of Badano and Nuti’s approach is their original argument for the view that political liberals are permitted to make the kind of recommendations they argue for. Here they seek to counter a common belief – shared by some liberals as well as their critics – that liberal political philosophy is a largely abstract endeavour, with little to offer real world politics, about which it remains embarrassingly naïve. Badano and Nuti’s primary target here are not “realist” critics of supposedly indulgent liberal theorising, but rather their fellow Rawlsians, some of whom have come to endorse a view implying that Rawls’s theory of political liberalism can have nothing to say about right-wing populists, since it applies only to societies composed entirely of so-called “reasonable” citizens, a category that excludes right-wing populists. Over the course of the first two chapters Badano and Nuti argue convincingly against this view, and in doing so develop an innovative account of what a theory of political liberalism is supposed to do. Ingenious in many respects, since the argument they develop here is largely inside baseball, of interest only to those already well versed in contemporary philosophical debates about public reason, I will say no more about it.
Instead, I will conclude by raising two worries about Badano and Nuti’s positive proposals. First, when it comes to the duty falling on ordinary citizens to put pressure on their friends and colleagues expressing populist or illiberal ideas, one might wonder about how effective most of us will be at containing such ideas, especially if we are unskilled in the arts of political persuasion. An admirable feature of the book is its careful attention to the different strategies that might be employed in encouraging people to revise their political views. However, little consideration is given to the possibility that most of us might be quite unsuited to the job and could even make things worse.
Second, I also wondered whether the language of duties is helpful when it comes to complex matters of political judgement. For instance, consider Badano and Nuti’s claim that municipal government officials have a “duty of reasonable non-cooperation” which requires them to refrain from cooperating with populist central governments pursuing rights-violating policies. Supposing that the wider population is divided over the question of whether the policy in question jeopardises any rights, as is often the case, then the decision about whether to withhold cooperation will be highly charged, since doing so could fuel resentment and even raise greater risks to the rights of people living elsewhere. It is surely not helpful to insist on the language of duties in such fraught situations.
In any case, this is an important and original book that not only develops a novel position in longstanding debates about the purposes of political liberalism but also demonstrates how political liberals can make progress on pressing real-world issues.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image credit: Lightspring on Shutterstock.
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