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?
Haha, it would indeed be ironic if my position has hardened after social media pushback! Certainly, I can't rule out that this has happened, but I'm not convinced that there's a great difference between the posts?!? I reread the original post and feel it asserted, quite clearly, that Rowling's positions were no longer liberal ones. In the new one, I concluded that Rowling is no longer a liberal public figure, yet also stated that she's clearly not an authoritarian and, overall is a politically ambiguous figure.
At the risk of being a bore (which is very real) I've thought a bit more about your position and I hope you don't mind me pushing a bit on the methodological side. I’m not convinced that Freeden’s semantic approach can take you as far as you want it to here. Freeden’s project is explicitly non-normative: it is designed to describe how ideological configurations shift, fragment, or become fixated, not to tell us when someone has crossed a threshold and ceased to belong to an ideological family altogether. At most, it allows us to say that Rowling’s liberalism looks narrower, more single-issue-driven, or more sharply articulated than before — which may well be true, but is also a fairly unremarkable observation, since people’s political priorities and styles change all the time.
To reach the stronger conclusion that she has moved away from liberalism as such seems to require an additional criterion of exclusion, and it’s not clear to me where that comes from. Neither Freeden nor the main strands of liberal theory (Mill, Kant, Rawls) supply a rule according to which intensity of focus, rhetorical abrasiveness, or failure to exhibit certain communicative virtues is sufficient to disqualify someone from liberalism. Those may be grounds for criticising tone, judgement, or political strategy — all legitimate concerns — but they are not, in themselves, departures from liberal principle.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to adopt whatever stipulative definition of liberalism you think is most useful for the purposes of your argument. But once one does that, the burden of justification can’t be avoided. A stipulation still needs reasons if it is to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share one’s intuitions. And it seems to me that all the obvious routes to such a justification are closed. The criterion you rely on can’t be grounded in Freeden’s sociology of political ideas, which is explicitly descriptive, because, in short, he has nothing to say about the features of Rowling's speech that you object to. And you have also been clear that you are not appealing to the familiar normative frameworks of Mill, Kant, or Rawls. That leaves the exclusion unsupported by either a principled justification or any identifiable source of authority. My concern, then, is not that a line is being drawn, but that the grounds for drawing it still remain unclear.
The parallel I see here is with media bias. A newspaper or programme can report accurately and opine within constraints of law. But that does not make it unbiased. And if we prize impartiality it matters. I'm with you on prizing liberalism's broad respect for complexity, whereas JK Rowling appears to prefer essentialising. It is not the detailed content of her pronouncements that is illiberal. It is their focus.
Brilliant analysis on how single-issue focus can erode liberal principles from within. The Freeden semantic approach is spot on here becasue it captures how movements like XR or anti-trans activism organize facts in ways that eventually override pluralist considerations. I've seen this play out in local politics where figureheads start reasonable but dunno how to pump the brakes once momentum builds. The line between passionate advocacy and Manichean crusading gets real blurry real fast.
I can understand your point about excessive focus on a single issue like law enforcement. If one’s overriding concern is reducing crime, it can cause the loss of due process and excessive punishment. But that’s not at all like JKR and the trans debate. Instead, there’s general agreement—as reflected in polls and expressly stated by JKR—that transgender people should not be discriminated against in housing, work, and the like. Instead the debate—and JKR—focus on 1) treatment of minors who are not yet full citizens and 2) areas of clashing rights, such as fairness vs inclusion in sports. And, importantly, her focus is a reaction to others. I mean, it’s not like JKR just woke up one day and decided to tweet about the sex binary. I’m sure she wishes it had never been necessary to do so.
This is ideologically motivated cope. JKR is being retroactively labelled as problematic now, because she so utterly embarrassed so many people so badly by being totally correct when they were hiding under the bed. Academics hate being proven wrong. I’m with Linehan.
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.
Thanks Colin, appreciated the exchange too. Yes, over here, Freeden > Kant & Rawls!
May I just say it's nice to see two people having an argument who know what they're actually arguing about!
Thanks James - very kind of you!
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?
Haha, it would indeed be ironic if my position has hardened after social media pushback! Certainly, I can't rule out that this has happened, but I'm not convinced that there's a great difference between the posts?!? I reread the original post and feel it asserted, quite clearly, that Rowling's positions were no longer liberal ones. In the new one, I concluded that Rowling is no longer a liberal public figure, yet also stated that she's clearly not an authoritarian and, overall is a politically ambiguous figure.
At the risk of being a bore (which is very real) I've thought a bit more about your position and I hope you don't mind me pushing a bit on the methodological side. I’m not convinced that Freeden’s semantic approach can take you as far as you want it to here. Freeden’s project is explicitly non-normative: it is designed to describe how ideological configurations shift, fragment, or become fixated, not to tell us when someone has crossed a threshold and ceased to belong to an ideological family altogether. At most, it allows us to say that Rowling’s liberalism looks narrower, more single-issue-driven, or more sharply articulated than before — which may well be true, but is also a fairly unremarkable observation, since people’s political priorities and styles change all the time.
To reach the stronger conclusion that she has moved away from liberalism as such seems to require an additional criterion of exclusion, and it’s not clear to me where that comes from. Neither Freeden nor the main strands of liberal theory (Mill, Kant, Rawls) supply a rule according to which intensity of focus, rhetorical abrasiveness, or failure to exhibit certain communicative virtues is sufficient to disqualify someone from liberalism. Those may be grounds for criticising tone, judgement, or political strategy — all legitimate concerns — but they are not, in themselves, departures from liberal principle.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to adopt whatever stipulative definition of liberalism you think is most useful for the purposes of your argument. But once one does that, the burden of justification can’t be avoided. A stipulation still needs reasons if it is to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share one’s intuitions. And it seems to me that all the obvious routes to such a justification are closed. The criterion you rely on can’t be grounded in Freeden’s sociology of political ideas, which is explicitly descriptive, because, in short, he has nothing to say about the features of Rowling's speech that you object to. And you have also been clear that you are not appealing to the familiar normative frameworks of Mill, Kant, or Rawls. That leaves the exclusion unsupported by either a principled justification or any identifiable source of authority. My concern, then, is not that a line is being drawn, but that the grounds for drawing it still remain unclear.
Thanks Colin - I'll think about this further!
The parallel I see here is with media bias. A newspaper or programme can report accurately and opine within constraints of law. But that does not make it unbiased. And if we prize impartiality it matters. I'm with you on prizing liberalism's broad respect for complexity, whereas JK Rowling appears to prefer essentialising. It is not the detailed content of her pronouncements that is illiberal. It is their focus.
Brilliant analysis on how single-issue focus can erode liberal principles from within. The Freeden semantic approach is spot on here becasue it captures how movements like XR or anti-trans activism organize facts in ways that eventually override pluralist considerations. I've seen this play out in local politics where figureheads start reasonable but dunno how to pump the brakes once momentum builds. The line between passionate advocacy and Manichean crusading gets real blurry real fast.
Thanks! Yes, I was involved in the 2016 Remain campaign and was very disillusioned with the evolution of that movement.
I can understand your point about excessive focus on a single issue like law enforcement. If one’s overriding concern is reducing crime, it can cause the loss of due process and excessive punishment. But that’s not at all like JKR and the trans debate. Instead, there’s general agreement—as reflected in polls and expressly stated by JKR—that transgender people should not be discriminated against in housing, work, and the like. Instead the debate—and JKR—focus on 1) treatment of minors who are not yet full citizens and 2) areas of clashing rights, such as fairness vs inclusion in sports. And, importantly, her focus is a reaction to others. I mean, it’s not like JKR just woke up one day and decided to tweet about the sex binary. I’m sure she wishes it had never been necessary to do so.
This is ideologically motivated cope. JKR is being retroactively labelled as problematic now, because she so utterly embarrassed so many people so badly by being totally correct when they were hiding under the bed. Academics hate being proven wrong. I’m with Linehan.
If you don’t want here we’ll take her.
The men pontificate. Meanwhile in the real world
https://x.com/i/status/2001325521259663805