Feminism and Liberalism

A Tale of Irreconcilable Differences

I am so, so sorry.

I need to talk about liberalism – and the terminology is really horrid. Liberalism, as the term is used in political science, is a foundation of Western society though it’s sadly misunderstood. It refers to an ideology based on freedom, liberty, rights and equality. It does not refer to the US Democratic Party, the Liberal Party of Australia nor is it synonymous with the political left. Rather, liberalism can encompass both the political left and the right as well as free marketeers and interventionists. Within this broad church there are points on which adherents differ – but, here, I’ll be sticking to the common ground.

There’s also confusion about the difference between liberalism and democracy. They aren’t the same, but they are closely related. Put simply, democracy determines who rules, liberalism determines what they may do. Liberalism makes democracy safe.

I’ll argue here that there are fundamental tensions between feminism and liberalism.

---

Introduction

Should you be fired for your political views? Should the government decide whether women can stay home with their children? Should accused men be denied a fair hearing? If your answer is no, you support liberalism.

Liberalism rests on a set of harmonious ideals: individual rights, equal opportunity, and liberty. It broke with social hierarchy in favour of tolerance, autonomy and freedom. Its genius was to trust that if people were free to chart their own course, we wouldn’t merely muddle through - we would prosper. And it works:

• The individual autonomy fostered by liberalism promotes psychological growth and well-being.

• Liberalism improves GDP growth.

• Countries that embrace liberalism are slower to go to war.

But the appeal of liberalism isn’t just about material benefits. We want to feel we are being treated with the same respect and consideration as our neighbours. And we don’t like being told what to say or believe. Liberalism is very human.

Author and commentator Jonathan Rauch sums it up beautifully:

Liberalism is the strangest and most counterintuitive social idea ever conceived, a disadvantage offset only by the fact that it is also the most successful social idea ever conceived.

So, what could threaten something so successful?

Feminist Opposition

The last decade has seen growing concern that liberalism is under attack. Much of the alarm has come from the political science establishment - including luminaries like Fukuyama, Mounk, Lilla and Gauchet. The weakness in their commentary is that they call out identity politics in general but hesitate to name the main culprit because feminism is generally sacrosanct in academia. So let me be clear – the main problem is feminism.¹

There are a number of reasons to see feminism² as the main problem:

• Feminism led the attack. Feminist criticism of liberalism emerged in the 1970s and was hardening into orthodoxy by the early 1980s. Critical race theory followed in the late 1980s and explicitly followed feminism’s lead. Queer theory was later still.

• Feminism has gone much further in institutionalising discrimination against its out-group. For example, the UN routinely treats emergency assistance to men as a secondary priority (1, 2, 3) or withholds help entirely. I see no evidence of comparable exclusion of whites or straights.

• Feminism has led the attack on rule of law. For instance #METOO, “Believe women”, trauma-informed approaches, Title IX and other so-called kangaroo courts have all eroded due process and the presumption of innocence for males. Only feminism has systematically dismantled procedural protections like this – there are no comparable attacks on the rights of whites or straights.

Feminism justifies its stance with a claim that liberalism is, in some way, male. To quote Zillah R. Eisenstein (described as one of the brightest minds in feminism) “liberalism has always privileged the phallus”.

The result is a clear consensus against liberalism. Daphne Patai quotes an academic feminist saying “Liberal is nearly the worst thing you can be.” And Jennifer Nedelsky, herself an academic feminist, concedes “Anyone who has listened closely to academic feminists will have heard this undercurrent of rage at all things liberal.”

But feminists don’t just voice their rage, they act on it.

Conflicts

To further its ideals, liberalism relies on core principles that include:

• equal rights for individuals and especially a right to equal opportunity;

• free speech and tolerance for the choices of others; and

• the rule of law.

Feminists attack each of these principles.

Individual Rights

I have to admit that I keep circling back to the theme that the damage feminism does is due to its focus on groups. Spoiler: I’m about to do it again.

Where liberalism cherishes the individual, feminists like Anne Phillips find even the concept “suspect” and surround the word with scare quotes:

The “individual” is a patriarchal category

Far from being apologetic, feminists see this stance as a feature:

the emphasis on groups that are different as opposed to individuals who are in principle the same is an important corrective to the traditionally liberal approach…

The result is that feminism displays a relentless binary logic towards individuals: Woman or man? In-group or out-group? Privilege or discrimination? In contrast, liberalism recognises the genuine richness and diversity of people. Instead of erasing individuality in a homogenous identity group, liberalism accepts that people are too complex and multi-faceted to be captured in a single binary.

In the real world there are puppets, paupers, pirates and poets yet feminism sees only men and women. Liberalism protects and safeguards all of them where feminism merely fights for in-group privilege.

The bitter irony is that feminists talk of diversity but actually use the word to cover discrimination.

I’ve talked about the consequences before: pervasive anti-male prejudice; reserving jobs, grants and services for women; endemic anti-male bias by the UN; etc. So here I’ll be very concise. Liberalism promotes rights, equality and respect for all. Feminism promotes a zero-sum competition between warring tribes – a competition worsened by intolerance.

Tolerance

Francis Fukuyama has spent much of his life pondering liberalism and offers an elegant conclusion:

The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance

Contrast that with the view of the hugely influential feminist Simone de Beauvoir:

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children… Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

Where liberalism favours tolerance, feminism starts from ideological certainty and moves to a moral absolutism. Hence, we see interference in male and female career choices; criminalisation of normal behaviour; and growing intrusion of the state into private matters. These are all important issues but, for now, I’ll focus on one aspect of tolerance that’s of paramount importance - free speech.

Liberalism goes well beyond acceptance of free speech – it’s held almost sacred. First, because liberalism recognises that the more we disagree, the better the chance at least one of us is right. Second, because it holds that a marketplace of ideas is the best hope to find truth and discard error. In his book What is Liberalism? Mike Brock puts it this way:

Liberalism begins with a simple but revolutionary recognition: human beings are fallible, disagreement is inevitable, and yet we must somehow organize society together. Every other political philosophy tries to solve this problem by eliminating it… But liberalism does something different—it builds systems that work because people disagree, not despite their disagreement.

Feminists have very different views. Jan Crosthwaite puts it as follows:

[G]enuine equality of persons can be secured only by the explicit promotion of certain moral viewpoints … and by denying the privacy of conscience and affective life as it has traditionally been conceived.

The justification is familiar. For example, feminist law professor Mary Anne Franks claims free speech is biased because “All of the drafters of the First Amendment were men.” And anyway, it is claimed, no one cares about free speech outside “privileged white man land”.

The effect is chilling:

• American academics are four times more likely to self-censor today than they were in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.

• Most students would report another student for making offensive comments and one in three think it acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker.

• Even in the general community most Americans find it necessary to self-censor their political views.

Liberalism gifted us a way to not merely tolerate pluralism and diversity but to harness it to make a better society. Feminism is robbing us of that strength.

Rule of Law

We often think of the law as a set of restrictions on people. Liberalism accepts the need for such restrictions but is uniquely concerned with restraining the state as well. It demands legal protections for all citizens – both procedural protections, like equality before the law, and substantive protections, like free speech.

Predictably, feminism starts from the assumption that “patriarchy infuses the legal system and all its workings, and that this is an unacceptable state of affairs.” (See also 1, 2, 3) Consequently feminists demand “a new jurisprudence” whose goal is “use of law as a tool” to achieve feminist goals. Thus, “feminist jurisprudence is not politically neutral”. In this, feminism is directly opposed to liberalism.

Liberalism insists on the “rule of law” including procedural protections like equality before the law, the presumption of innocence and due process. Leading feminist academics like Catharine MacKinnon reject them:

The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible

MacKinnon was also very influential in arguing against equality before the law for men. Later feminists like Zillah Eisenstein were more circumspect claiming that they weren’t opposing equality so much as reinventing it, so that it “no longer relies on us being treated the same.”

Feminist justice is about choosing sides, not about choosing principles. Safeguards are seen as mere obstacles. To quote Katharine T. Bartlett’s influential work Feminist Legal Methods, “[S]o-called neutral means … do not serve women’s interests well.”

This is not a minor disagreement over policy. It is a rejection of liberalism’s core insistence that law must bind even those who hold power.

Conclusion

I’ve argued previously that feminism isn’t an heir to the West’s moral-intellectual tradition, it’s a rival. Now, I’m doubling down on that claim. Feminism isn’t just a rival to the traditions that made our society great, it’s a danger.

It’s a danger because it is dismantling our strongest protection – liberalism. We know liberalism can be dismantled – it has happened many times from Weimar Germany through to contemporary Hungary. And history teaches us to fear the consequences.

We are losing liberalism because we forgot Hannah Arendt’s lesson that even dangerous ideologies can feign virtue. But our biggest failure has been not caring. As Mike Brock wrote:

The irony is exquisite: we’re losing liberalism because we’ve forgotten what it actually is.

It’s time to engage with what we are losing. Time to stand up to the bullies and protect the individual. Time to push back on prejudice and refocus on tolerance. Time to call out discrimination and rededicate ourselves to equality.

Feminism offers the same tribal warfare that has dominated human history. Liberalism was our defence against that ancient trap. That’s why it is under attack and that’s why we cannot afford to retreat.

1. When critics examine feminism, they turn to what feminism does. When feminists defend feminism, they turn to what feminism says. I'm in the former camp.

2. The reflex response to my critique is likely “But not all feminists. What about liberal feminism?”. But that response doesn’t serve for a number of reasons.

The fundamental problem is that, as I’ve pointed out before, ideologies should be judged on what they do, not on what they say - especially us vs them ideologies. And, as the essay explains, what feminism does is expand sex-based discrimination, narrow free debate, and weaken the presumption of innocence. In other words, it opposes liberalism.

Second, liberal feminism is an anachronism. There was a time in the evolution of feminism when it was possible to support both liberalism and feminism, but those days are past. Today, the feminist orthodoxy in women’s studies and other institutions, is overwhelmingly against liberalism. Liberal feminism is frequently criticised as a failure (1, 2, 3) and academics relegate it to the past tense. To ram home the point, consider Christina Hoff Sommers - easily the most prominent figure to describe herself as a liberal feminist. It’s telling that, while she may be liberal, it’s doubtful she is a feminist since she is routinely attacked as an anti-feminist. (1, 2)

Finally, there are a few feminists who still describe themselves as liberal feminists – most notably Elizabeth Anderson of University of Michigan. Yet even she calls for people to be classified into groups to determine how they are treated - something totally opposed to liberalism’s commitment to individual rights and equality. Similarly, other so-called liberal feminists also typically support policies like quotas that show they are, in fact, no friends of liberalism.