How Bill Maher and other old-school liberals came to be in a political pickle

I have respect and affection for the old-school liberals. Many were, and are, people of great integrity. And there were things they were right about: civil rights and political free speech, to name a pair of important examples. It must be noted that in the 1950s and 1960s, their record on those issues was much better than the record of many conservatives.
Today, old-school liberals — the television host Bill Maher is one such example — are in shock about woke ideology’s influence in the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. They see the illiberal trends and ideological dogmatism of the contemporary left as an abject betrayal of the principles they stood for, and they are deeply distressed by the political situation we now find ourselves in.
Some readers will recall Maher’s strenuous efforts of late to distinguish his own liberalism from what has become the mainstream ideology of people on the left and in the Democratic Party who “love diversity, except the diversity of ideas.” He insists that he didn’t change, but that “the left and the Democrats have changed.”
There is certainly truth in the idea that woke ideology is betrayal of liberal values, but it’s not the whole story. Getting at the whole story will require old-school liberals to engage in some serious, self-critical reflection — because there are respects in which they themselves, through the decisions they made and the causes they embraced, bear responsibility for our cultural woes.
The truth is that the old-school liberals planted — and to a significant degree nurtured — the seeds of the plant whose manifest toxicity rightly distresses them today. How? Well, in the 1960s, old-school liberals made what was, in my view, a grave mistake: They completely bought into the ideology that the late sociologist Robert Bellah labeled “expressive individualism.”
The distinguished legal scholar Carter Snead usefully describes expressive individualism as follows:
“It takes the individual, atomized self to be the fundamental unit of human reality. This self is not defined by its attachments or network of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment.”
Among their primary motivations for embracing expressive individualism was that it represented an affirmation of various crucial aspects of the sexual revolution. But that was a conscious, deliberate and thoroughly ideologically motivated choice that the old-school liberals made. They certainly didn’t have to embrace expressive individualism to defend racial equality or freedom of speech.
To their great credit, some old-school liberals — people like Irving Kristol, Richard John Neuhaus and Mary Ann Glendon — bolted from the movement or were excommunicated from it precisely because they rejected expressive individualism — and all that it licensed and enabled, from “sexual freedom” to the drug culture — as incompatible with sound philosophical anthropology and the flourishing of human beings. Most liberals, however, chose to embrace some version of the ideology of expressive individualism.
In their minds, it seemed to pave the way for “enlightened” social policies and enable the deeply-rooted cultural changes that they sought — liberation from supposedly “outdated” norms of morality, and the paramount right of every individual to “control their own destiny,” to paraphrase Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. But they failed to heed the parable of Chesterton’s Fence: Don’t tear down a fence until you understand why it was erected in the first place.
Thus was ushered in what I have termed the “Age of Feeling.” Faith and reason as the objective arbiters of truth and goodness were essentially abandoned by liberals in the 1960s. While lip service continued to be paid to “reason” and, in mainline churches, even to some loose conception of “faith,” for many people feeling became the standard of judgment — the ultimate measure of right and wrong, and of whether to perform (or approve of) an action or not.
“If it feels good, do it” was the perfect, if imbecilic and completely irrational, slogan of the aptly described “Me Generation.”
Self-reflection by old-school liberals will reveal how short the jump was from expressive individualism to woke identitarianism and illiberalism —and it is precisely that kind of reflection which is needed now. True, the examination of conscience I’m urging won’t be easy. Facing up to our shortcomings never is. When things go wrong or mistakes are made, all of us — not just old-school liberals — want to believe that “we were right all along, our values were sound, it’s just that we were betrayed and our movement was hijacked!”
The old-school liberals, by and large, are intellectually honest and thoughtful people. What’s more, some of the things they stood for — and currently stand for — are right. Critics on the conservative side, myself included, need to acknowledge and honor that, taking care to bring to the conversation a scalpel rather than a machete, and avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Indeed, those of us on the conservative side have our own self-reflection to do.
The old-school liberals’ sense that their values have been betrayed and their movement hijacked is not baseless or completely wrong. But it’s only part of the story, the part that’s easy to accept. It’s the part that’s not so easy to accept that now needs to be confronted.
Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.