Systemic or Self: Illiberal Progressivism vs. Classical Liberalism

My foray into the Illiberal Progressive vs. Classical Liberal worldviews did not begin with an examination of particular public policies debates, but with how people understand humanity itself. We started by exploring human nature, followed by a brief reflection on human rights and happiness.

With that foundation, we now turn to how these contrasting worldviews approach the matter of human responsibility. Should we ascribe the credit/blame for human behaviors more to systemic inputs or the self-driven pursuits of individuals?

Weak on Crime?

One place to start our analysis is by taking stock of how each worldview understands criminality and penal justice. Why would Illiberal Progressives energetically back initiatives like defunding the police or giving criminals more lenient sentences for violent offenders? Are they really "weak on crime?"

It all flows from understanding human nature as a mostly blank slate that is written on by external forces. When someone commits a crime, Illiberal Progressives will trace a straight line from that person's behavior and mental state to the environmental circumstances that influenced that person. If a person received bad programming their behavior will reflect those inputs. The causal mechanisms for poor behavior are rooted in systemic traumas and negligence rather than personal choice / immorality. So the ultimate responsibility lies beyond the individual and with the collective(s) the individual exists within. Illiberal Progressives see criminals as victims of broken systems.

The opposite is also true. If an individual behaves well and attains some degree of achievement, it is mostly attributable to the advantages and nurture they received. They are deemed to be externally "privileged." And as you can imagine, that means a major share of that success is due and payable to the collective that spawned it. Taxing the rich as societal payback is seen as a moral imperative, not just a fiscal tool.

It is not surprising that Critical Race Theory has become pervasive among Illiberal Progressives. Criminality is an inevitable reaction and malignant byproduct of racial/economic systems of oppression. If a particular demographic is disproportionately committing crimes it must be because they have been systemically robbed of opportunities to thrive. Therefore, if we want to tackle crime most of our resources should target systems of racism and oppression by encouraging greater diversity, representation, and inclusion.

Toxic Feedback Loops

Illiberal Progressive logic dictates that traditional deterrences do precious little to prevent criminal acts. In fact, strong police presence and other deterrences like prison sentences are perverse extensions of systemic problems, not solutions to them. Consistent with their worldview, they believe the traditional criminal justice / prison system incites more criminality and recidivism. If crime were a skin rash, Illiberal Progressives see traditional approaches as aggressively scratching and spreading the rash instead of treating underlying causes.

The unconstrained optimism of Progressives casts criminality as a natural consequence of systemic victimization. Victim-criminals don't need more punishment, they need help from society to rewrite and reorient their internal operating code. The problem of criminality is understood as a toxic feedback loop of trauma-induced reactions reinforced by trauma-inducing consequences.

The Illiberal Progressive worldview is internally consistent with itself when it come to their bundle of views about human nature / human rights / human responsibility. Human responsibility lies more with the collective inputs than with individual decisions. So we must all take ownership of the criminality around us to the degree that we participate in or prop-up particular systems of oppression. We should be less invested in civil punishment and more collectively invested in civil nurture and restoration.

Classic Counter-Arguments

The Classically Liberal view does not deny that there are various systems of oppression, racism, economic exploitations, and social/individual traumas that impact human formation. But it stops short of denying individual responsibility or assigning it to society-at-large because it does not believe that these inputs are necessarily deterministic. Classical Liberalism believes that humans largely retain their individual moral agency despite their circumstances.

One of the first lines of argument is the principle that humans are existentially more sentient and significant than programmable Pavlovian dogs. We may indeed have a "primitive brain" that responds to certain stimuli, but we also have a baseline (preprogrammed) moral conscience and executive function that gives us the mental space to evaluate and weigh our choices.

Think about it at an experiential level. We all know the feeling of having an impulse that we can stop to evaluate before acting. That executive evaluation may not change our action/response, but there is cognitive space between our impulse and our action - and that is what we call moral agency. This agency undermines the notion of pure behavioral determinism.

Exceptions to Determinism

The second Classical argument is to point to outcomes that have defied deterministic expectations. Not every person born into generational poverty remains in generational poverty. Not every person in from a marginalized group has failed to achieve success in various institutional systems. Philosophers have called this dynamic the "via negativa," or way of negation. Sometimes people decide who they DON'T want to be by virtue of the negative influences they have had.

Of course, the reverse is also true - people who have experienced and received every conceivable external privilege have made a wreck of their lives. Too much privilege often leads to entitled and abusive people who prey on others. Environmental inputs are not reliable predictors of human behavior, which suggests that the Illiberal Progressive view is too simplistic in its assumptions. "Whiteness" sounds like de facto privilege until you spend time in a poor coal-mining town of West Virginia...

An Illiberal Progressive might reasonably respond that pointing to anomalies and exceptions does not establish a rule. Fair enough. Classical Liberals would not deny that urban ghettos produce significant disadvantages and distortions in human socio-economic opportunity and development. The point is that even an impoverished person in a tenement retains their fundamental human dignity and moral agency. Socio-economic poverty and marginalization are not excuses for criminality and violence.

If you don't punish the guilty, you make victims of the innocent. - Thomas Sowell

A final Classical argument is that failure to deter criminality with penal justice leads to more victimization of innocent people. There are mounds of research showing that a majority of violent crime is committed by repeat offenders. At the risk of oversimplifying, it is the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) at work in the social sphere. Some studies have concluded that 5-10% of violent criminals are committing 70%+ of crimes! So what we observe in the data is not widespread systemic consequences across whole communities, but particular degenerate individuals who are not being properly detained and deterred.

Freedom of the Will

Classical Liberalism emphasizes the human dignity, moral agency, and responsibility of each individual in spite of the collective. This does not take societies off the hook for pursuing human flourishing, but it does not conflate the guilt of the individual with the guilt of the group.

I have a good friend who has been a very successful businessman. He once said, "if everyone is in charge, no one is in charge." In other words, when we assign responsibility to everyone, it turns out that no one is responsible... The practical outcome is chaos. Illiberal Progressivism has the veneer of good intentions, but it is impractical and dangerous.