I still think J.K. Rowling has moved away from liberalism: a reply to my critics
As I expected, last week’s piece about J.K. Rowling’s move away from liberalism proved controversial. The article was my most read ever and people made hundreds of comments on Substack, X and Bluesky. Some reaction was, ahem, spirited and Graham Linehan’s dismissal of the piece was succinct (‘Oh do f*ck off’). I would play the world’s smallest violin, but even my mother laughed at this remark.
Yet much comment was more measured and thought-provoking. I received several interesting replies on X and the Oxford sociologist Colin Mills [hereafter C. Mills, to distinguish him from his near namesake J.S. Mill who also appears in this piece] amalgamated many of these objections in a Substack comment of almost 1,000 words. As with many X comments, C. Mills emphasized the right of Rowling to make such interventions,
‘[J.S.] Mill’s view is straightforward: a liberal society interferes with a person’s conduct or speech only when it causes harm to others. And [J.S.] Mill is emphatic that harm must be distinguished from offence. Hurt feelings, insult, shock, disgust or moral outrage do not count as harm; if they did, meaningful dissent would be impossible. On that understanding, I cannot see anything Rowling has said or advocated that breaches the harm principle.’
However, this concerns the right of Rowling to indulge in such discourse and I have never disputed this. The question of whether Rowling’s interventions are themselves liberal is a distinct one. In liberal societies, all citizens have an equal right to indulge in vituperative and offensive discourse, yet not all speech can be liberal in substance.
In other words, a thicker conception of liberalism is at stake. Later in his comments, C. Mills addresses this issue,
‘Kant and Rawls both stress the equal moral status of persons as free and rational agents... Kant, in fact, is severe on this point. Respect for persons consists in truthfulness and in recognising their rational agency, not in protecting them from discomfort. Indulging a belief one considers false is, for Kant, a failure of honesty, not an expression of respect. He expects civility of principle, not civility of tone. On that view, Rowling’s bluntness may be unwelcome, but it is not illiberal… Your appeal to “respect for dignity” needs the same clarification. If “dignity” simply refers to the equal moral standing of persons – the Kantian thought that individuals are ends in themselves – then nothing Rowling has said violates it.’
After Kant, numerous thinkers have expanded upon liberal conceptions of dignity and, in my opinion, Rowling’s proclivity for belittling transgender people, covered in the original piece, does violate these. Moreover, how exclusive are these criteria? Would such an understanding of liberalism exclude those who almost everyone would agree are not liberal? Let us imagine a GB News commentator who speaks about immigration for an hour, yet merely discusses the grooming gangs scandal and illegal boat crossings (both real phenomena) in an aggressive and binary fashion. Every one of their statements might be true and recognize the rational agency of subjects. Indeed, the commentator might consider their remarks to be a necessary means of disabusing opponents of false beliefs. Yet most people would not regard such a commentator as a liberal one. As I asserted in the original piece, liberal discourse organizes facts in a way which reflects concern with individual dignity and political pluralism; the commentator’s remarks would not meet these standards.
How does Rowling compare to our hypothetical commentator? To be fair, her positions on the transgender issue do not consistently degrade transgender people, even if, as I argued in the original piece, she does this too often. Moreover, the question of her wider views complicates matters. To the best of my knowledge, Rowling’s positions on broader issues such as welfare and education policy remain liberal. Then again, she does not dedicate the great majority of her time to these other issues. And given the nature of her interventions on the issue on which she spends most of her time, regarding her as a liberal is difficult. The question of the truth of Rowling’s statements is something of a distraction. Countless statements about the world are true, as those of the GB News commentator might be; when diagnosing ideology, one is concerned with the organization of these statements.
Some argued that I was tone-policing. Mary Harrington emphasized the gendered nature of this issue. For Harrington, if women speak clearly on this issue they are condemned as ‘shrill’ or ‘hateful’; if they do not speak clearly enough, they are ignored.
I understand the concerns in this area, yet do not regard them as sufficient grounds for abandoning the analysis of tone. In politics, tone is highly revealing. For example, numerous studies find that Manichean and aggressive tones are associated with extremism. When the Sun newspaper sensationalizes a delicate issue or a Member of Parliament (MP) makes a spittle-flecked speech, their tone is rightly scrutinized; it is inseparable from the nature of the message. Rowling is a major figure and her X posts have a broadly equivalent reach to the Sun newspaper or the MP; analysis of her tone is entirely legitimate.
Such attention to the social context in which ideological discourse take place reflects my preference for Freeden’s semantic approach, rather than approaches rooted in political theory. Crucially, Freeden’s approach encourages analysis of what is, in my opinion, the driver of Rowling’s trajectory: focus on the single-issue.
As C. Mills says, focus on single issues is not in itself incompatible with liberalism. However, there is clear potential for the single issue to override all other concerns. In the last few decades, it is easy to think of single-issue movements (e.g. new atheism, the People’s Vote and Extinction Rebellion) which have overstepped liberal-democratic boundaries. In my opinion, this reflects the logic of the single issue; because of its importance, other considerations become secondary.
Correctly, C. Mills reminds us that Rowling has not explicitly called for measures which contravene liberal-democratic standards. Yet the tendencies which I underlined in the original piece – the Manichean tone, the simplification of complex issues, the identification of enemies – are classic symptoms of the single-issue campaign which, if not adequately constrained by liberal-democratic procedure, becomes quite dangerous. Future public inquiries into gender services for children may well be necessary and consistent with liberal principles of justice, yet they would be far from straightforward. And in cases in which similar processes have taken place – I am very interested in processes of historic justice in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe – those who deal in Rowling’s rhetoric have not tended to advance the liberal cause.
Overall, Rowling’s case is ambiguous. Clearly, she is far from being unequivocally illiberal; as we have noted, her stances on many issues are straightforwardly liberal ones. Yet her binary approach, willingness to deprecate transgender people and laser-like focus on this issue mean that, in my opinion, she is no longer a liberal public figure.
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Thanks for the reply, Tom. I think the remaining disagreement is fairly specific. You seem to be reading liberalism as itself entailing certain liberal virtues of communication — about tone, emphasis, and rhetorical form — whereas I was using liberalism in its more canonical sense as a doctrine concerned with when coercive power (laws, sanctions, punishment) is justified and what equal legal standing requires. On that view, once speech does not cross a harm threshold or deny equal standing before the law, liberalism is largely silent about how it ought to be expressed. Other moral or political considerations may of course apply, and I’m sympathetic to many of the virtues you emphasise, but they are not entailed by liberalism as such. In short, you treat what you regard as liberal virtues as part of liberalism itself, whereas I don’t. I’ve appreciated the exchange in any case.
I mostly agreed with your previous post that stirred-up the controversy. But, in a very ironic twist, I feel you have hardened your position over the last week and as a result I only partially agree with this sequel, and I disagree with your final point. What's interesting here is to wonder whether it was the the week of being under virtual bombardment that caused you to harden your position, and if so, to wrap that observation around and feed that it back into the original question.
I disagree with your final point that Rowling is no longer a liberal, and I think you're on loose footing when essentially arguing this is because she's a "single issue" speaker now and is occasionally a bit rude. Is someone really a single-issue speaker when all anyone ever asks that person these days is about the single issue? If someone, by being braver and more resourced and informed than others, becomes a figurehead for a single issue, and the movement turns to them frequently, then how can that plausibly count against them in terms of liberalism? I agree with C. Mills that focus on single issues is not in itself incompatible with liberalism; you then say, "However, there is clear potential for the single issue to override all other concerns." It sounds like you are arguing that liberals should *refuse* to allow themselves to become figureheads for movements, lest they be judged to have become a single-issue activist and thus, be in danger of being judged illiberal due to tone. We are certainly asking a lot of liberals here: not just wisdom and intelligence, patience and tolerance, but also enough restraint so as to not care *too* much about the issue at hand and to keep busy with other stuff even when the movement calls. Even if that issue is really important and itself a matter of liberalism.
And this leads to a real worry that I have here: how are liberals to defend liberalism against activists who are themselves single-issue fanatics, if being sucked-in and allowing the issue to dominate one's output itself becomes a liberal disqualifier? It seems to me that you are creating a rule-set for liberals that illiberals don't and never will obey, and you're setting up liberalism to be unable to defend itself with sufficient vigour against the multitude of threats it now faces. Denying liberalism the tools and methods it needs to win against illiberalism will hand the future to illiberalism. For example, would you seriously argue that the liberals in America currently trying to resist the real march of autocracy should chill-out and keep their focus well spread out to avoid becoming single-issue? Or is that issue important enough that it's okay to become single-issue on it?