“Illiberal Ideas Are Having a Negative Effect on Our Political Culture”: A Conversation with Thomas Main

By Greg Berman

In a 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden issued a dramatic warning: democracy in the United States is “under assault,” he announced. Biden declared that the dangers of rising extremism, particularly from “MAGA Republicans,” posed a “clear and present danger” to the country. 

In making this claim, Biden was echoing the sentiments of countless pundits, think tanks, and editorial pages that have been warning of a “coming crisis.” For many, the recent shooting of former president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the idea that the country is falling apart at the seams. 

According to Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.”

The difference between “posturing” and “provoking” violence is, of course, a significant one. To what extent does the spread of radical, and even authoritarian, ideas online translate into real-world action, let alone violence? To get a handle on this question, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Fellow of Practice Greg Berman reached out to Thomas Main, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York, who has been tracking illiberalism in American politics for years. In two books published by the Brookings Institution, The Rise of the Alt-Right (2018) and The Rise of Illiberalism (2022), Main traces the trajectory of illiberal political ideas and voices in the United States in the years since World War II. 

Main defines illiberalism as any political ideology that explicitly rejects principles of liberal democracy, including values such as political egalitarianism, human rights, electoral democracy, the rule of law, and tolerance. While he acknowledges the existence of some movements that meet this definition on the left of the political spectrum, most of Main’s energies are devoted to studying extremist right-wing political thinking. What he finds is sobering. 

The centerpiece of The Rise of Illiberalism is a study of nearly 2,000 websites that have been identified by various sources as being illiberal. Main establishes a taxonomy of different kinds of illiberal websites (e.g., antisemitic, anti-feminist, conspiracy theorist) He also tracks the number of visitors to each site as well as the amount of engagement sparked by each site. The findings suggest that the illiberal left audience is about 1.3 percent the size of its right-wing counterpart. Main concludes, “The Illiberal Left is minute, entirely isolated, and unengaged. The Illiberal Right is sizeable, closely connected with mainstream political tendencies, and dramatically more engaged with political discourse than any other ideological tendency.”

The following transcript of Main’s conversation with Berman has been edited for length and clarity.

Berman: Your most recent book is entitled The Rise of Illiberalism. I wanted to start by asking you a basic question: Has there actually been a rise in illiberalism, or is what we’re living through now just a case of illiberal tendencies that have always been with us becoming more visible because of the democratizing effects of the internet?

Main: I think that there has been a rise over the post-war period, although it’s kind of hard to pin that down. In my book, I look at the numbers of visitors to illiberal sites. Strictly speaking, if I was going to say that there has been a rise, I ought to be able to present numbers from an earlier period and then compare them. Unfortunately, that turns out to be very difficult to do—it is hard to get good data on visits to websites that go back more than a few years. I’ve also looked to see if you can find circulation numbers for the John Birch Society’s publications and other earlier illiberal publications, but these numbers really can’t be compared with visits to websites. So that’s the first thing I’d say: it’s kind of been difficult to actually quantify a rise.

What I've been concerned about is the penetration of illiberal ideas, anti-democratic ideas, into American political culture and, therefore, the undermining of liberal democracy.

Nonetheless, I think in terms of the salience of illiberal ideas in American political culture, I would say that there has been a rise. If you go back to the late ’50s and early ’60s, there were racist and antisemitic movements which were analogous to the illiberalism we see today. But you also had gatekeeping by editors of political magazines and publishers and by broadcast media. If you couldn’t get into the National Review, you had to start your own publication, which was very expensive. So, for the most part, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the hardcore segregationists were pretty effectively marginalized. This was true right up to the coming of digital media. Digital media allowed these illiberal groups that had been hanging on by their fingernails to attract larger audiences. And by the way, my reading is that the old right-wing extremists like the John Birch Society were much less radical than places like The Daily Stormer are today.

One of the things that I find in the social media era is that people have to yell pretty loudly these days in order to be heard above the din. As a result, I think that there is a lot of alarmism. How big a problem is the rise in illiberalism that you describe? How worried are you that it could lead to real-life violence as opposed to internet dust ups?

Up until very recently, I haven’t been so much concerned about the violence. What I’ve been concerned about is the penetration of illiberal ideas, anti-democratic ideas, into American political culture and, therefore, the undermining of liberal democracy. The undermining of liberal democracy doesn’t necessarily have to involve violence. 

When I wrote my first book on the alt-right, people would say to me that it’s just some crazy people that are having no effect and that even to talk about them is a bad idea. Nowadays, I don’t feel it’s necessary any more to demonstrate that there is a significant audience for illiberal ideas. Besides my research, the proof of that is the growth of election denialism in the GOP. Refusing to accept the results of a democratic election is a rejection of a key component of liberal democracy. So the evidence is quite strong that illiberal ideas are having a negative effect on our political culture.

An issue that I’m trying to deal with now is: Does this lead to violence? The Dangerous Speech Project has attempted a definition of dangerous speech. They say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group. What I’m now trying to do is to go back to the illiberal websites that I identified in my earlier work and to pull out their characteristic vocabulary and come up with a dictionary of dangerous speech and hate speech. I’ve only just started this research. 

The roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism. 

Let me give you an example. Vox Day is a science-fiction writer and video game reviewer. He became involved in an episode that was known as Gamergate, which was all about sexism in video games. That was kind of the beginning of alt-right trolling. This guy, Vox Day, established a blog called Vox Populi, which has a couple million visits a month and high rates of engagement. Before he started up Vox Populi, he had another site called Alpha Game, which I believe no longer exists. Anyhow, when you go to Alpha Game . . . oh man, talk about violence. He says that aggression should always be met with aggression. That logic dictates that any failure to respond to violence with even more violence is only going to incentivize and encourage its use in the future. I could go on. It’s pretty radical stuff. I’m finding that on some of these illiberal sites, you do see stuff like this which is as close to coming out and endorsing violence as you can possibly imagine.

I’m thinking back to the kind of music that I listened to as a teenager and the films that I watched back then. I think you could fairly say that a healthy percentage were effectively glorifying violence. But I never engaged in any violent behavior. It is one thing to consume, or even engage in, violent rhetoric. It’s another thing to perpetrate violence in the real world.

I do think you are putting your finger on a problem with the dangerous speech concept. If you say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence, that’s a pretty broad definition. And how do you know that it increases the risk? How do you measure that? I don’t know what the answer is. I think it is possible to look at the way these sites talk about violence, but it’s very tricky to prove that talk actually results in more violence.

One of the things that you document in your book is that the audience for antifa and hardcore anarchist sites is dwarfed by the number of visitors to The Daily Stormer and other illiberal sites on the right. Why do you think it is that right illiberalism is a more powerful force than left illiberalism?

I think the roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism. 

In the ’60s, you had groups like the Weathermen on the left, but it was all pretty thin. It never had a massive audience. It never really succeeded in getting into any form of electoral politics. Communism has never been a big draw in the United States. Racism is something else. That has much deeper roots here. For many people, being White is what it means to be an American. Racial consciousness is a facet of the American psyche.

You are pretty dismissive of the idea that political correctness and censoriousness on the left is a big problem. But you also spend a lot of time talking about what you call an “ethics of controversy” that is rooted in tolerance and respect for one’s adversary. You call out the Ann Coulters of the world for engaging in “illiberalism lite.” Do you think that there are equivalent figures on the left?

This is something I’m going to have to look into more. But if you go to the websites of Black Lives Matter or mainstream Hispanic interest groups or feminist groups, it is hard to find a rhetoric that would really pass as anti-White, anti-Anglo, anti-male. I mean, if you go back to the sixties, you can find feminists creating organizations called Society for Cutting Up Men, which is SCUM. That would be an example of feminist illiberalism. I don’t see that kind of talk these days.

Fair enough. But I guess I do see a lot of left-wing politicians and pundits who, echoing Hillary Clinton, refer to conservatives and Republicans as being deplorable or words to that effect. That kind of rhetoric is not racism or misandry, but it treats political opponents with contempt, I would argue.

I think you have to distinguish between principled illiberalism and people just shooting their mouths off. And in American politics, you get a fair number of people shooting their mouths off. You can always find foolish remarks. It may well be that there’s more of that than there used to be on the left because the rhetoric on the right has become so extreme.

I think that there is a tendency to belittle the importance of ideas. This has been around for a long time. My sense is that intellectuals can have a great impact on policy and politics.

Occasionally, I run into progressive illiberalism that encourages a certain amount of self-censorship. But I think most of what passes as progressive illiberalism is within the spectrum of normal democratic politics. It’s not a healthy part, perhaps, but there’s quite a difference between that sort of stuff and the right-wing illiberalism I’m talking about. When you say the election was stolen and we have an illegitimate president, that’s crossing the line. Say what you want about Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t refuse to concede.

A lot of your book is about our current intellectual climate. Playing devil’s advocate for a second, how important are intellectuals really when you talk about combating illiberalism? How would you respond to the argument that it is more important to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives?

Well, listen, you’d be crazy to say that intellectuals are more important than organizing to increase access to the ballot, or to defeat election denials, or to increase equality. 

I think intellectuals used to be more influential than they are now because they used to play an important role of translating and disseminating ideas. Among other things, intellectuals were gatekeepers. They were the people who sort of decided which ideas deserved to be more widely disseminated and which would be ignored. That was a very important function. Now I think the power of intellectuals has been vastly undermined by the rise of digital media and by the shake up in the public perception of the legitimacy of our regime. And it’s much harder for intellectuals to perform the gatekeeping function that they used to perform. I would like to see a world in which intellectuals regain the ability to gatekeep. And part of that involves finding a better way to moderate digital media. 

The American system was created to make big change difficult. Every system needs the capacity to occasionally make non-incremental change.

But I also think that there’s been, for a long time, a self-destructive streak amongst intellectuals. You have the curious phenomenon of anti-intellectual intellectuals. One example of that is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi doesn’t believe that people come up with racist ideas that result in racist policies. He believes it goes the other way around: that people come up with racist policies and then dream up racist ideas to support them. I have respect for Kendi, but that particular position is kind of a vulgar Marxist position. How are you going to combat racism without engaging in ideas? I don’t understand what that even means. 

I think that there is a tendency to belittle the importance of ideas. This has been around for a long time. The Bible is right when it says that as a man thinks, so is he. My sense is that intellectuals can have a great impact on policy and politics. I think it’s a mistake to write off intellectuals.

Have you read Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of The Public? It’s a few years old, but it’s one of the better books I’ve read about the impact of the internet and social media, in particular. I think if Gurri were listening to this conversation, he might say that the crisis of public confidence in intellectuals has its roots in the underperformance of intellectual elites. That, at key moments, the intellectual consensus about things like the state of the economy pre-2008 or the handling of the COVID pandemic has proved to be wrong, or at least not entirely correct. And that the internet has essentially allowed the public to see that the emperor has no clothes. How would you respond to that argument?

You would have to make a list of all of the positions that intellectuals took and then you somehow would have to decide objectively whether those positions were right or wrong. And then you would have to compare the percentage of correct positions to that of other groups like politicians or businessmen or lawyers. Would you find that intellectuals were right much less frequently than other elites? I don’t think so. 

I think intellectuals make a contribution. For example, the tax reform act of the mid ’80s was the result of a long-term analysis of the economics of taxation. Expert economists came to the conclusion that the income tax was unjustifiable. Their thinking got boiled down into a discrete public policy idea: lower the rates, broaden the base. That had an impact. There are many other areas of public policy where ideas have had an impact. 

Of course, we can also talk about episodes where intellectuals were wrong. You might point to the ’30s, when many intellectuals apologized for Stalin’s regime. So there are certainly examples of failures, but in general, intellectuals perform a function that is necessary.

One of the arguments you advance is that the rise of illiberalism has been driven by the suboptimal performance of the American government. Does President Biden’s recent legislative winning streak change your analysis? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you react to the argument, advanced by scholars like Frances Lee, that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it’s always functioned in terms of legislating? For all of the talk of partisan gridlock, bipartisan legislation still happens fairly regularly.

I think gridlock is a problem. It’s more of a problem now than it has been in the past. In my book, I argue that the gridlock is so strong that we need a realigning election, which brings all branches of government into alignment, so we can get big things done. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for Biden to pull that off. And I suppose he did, but he pulled that off as narrowly as humanly possible, with the smallest possible majority that you can get in the Senate.

And so Biden has been unable to make the kind of changes that Lyndon B. Johnson was able to make. LBJ had overwhelming majorities, and he had the Supreme Court on his side. But it turns out that even with the narrowest of majorities, Biden has gotten quite a bit done. So my conclusion is that a realigning election works.

To answer the second part of your question, if you say that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it always has because it was created to ensure that big change is difficult, I would say that’s part of the problem. The system was created to make big change difficult. Every system needs the capacity to occasionally make non-incremental change. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with incremental change, but sometimes, dramatic change is needed. So the American system, although it’s kind of built to mostly encourage incremental change, it occasionally allows big changes. And the main way that happens has been through realigning elections like in 1932 and in 1964.

I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that I have just written a book that attempts to make the case for incremental change.

I just want to be clear, incremental change and non-incremental change are the yin and yang of American politics. So I’m not saying that incremental change is bad by any means. Also let me just point out that I’m not talking about radical change in the sense of let’s throw the Constitution out and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Non-incremental change is different from radical change.

I think you and I mostly agree. Where you and I may depart is that I don’t see a significant appetite right now for non-incremental change in the country. If you look at our elections and at polling, there is no political mandate for non-incremental change. And I think that there are real dangers if the party in power pushes through non-incremental change in a deeply divided country.

I would agree that there’s got to be a long period of time spent building up a movement to achieve the kind of non-incremental change I’m talking about. The time is not ripe now by any means. And it’s going to be a long, hard slog to work our way out of the mess we’re in. It may be a 50-year project.

In your book, you argue that irony is the dominant mode of discourse on the internet. Maybe I’m occupying different parts of the internet, but I find umbrage to be the dominant mode of discourse. I find that the internet is a place where people are very open about expressing their outrage about this, that, and the other, rather than operating with the kind of cool attachment that irony implies.

That’s interesting. There’s a book called The Outrage Industry that was written about a decade ago that does an analysis of various sorts of websites and demonstrates that expressions of outrage are much more often found in right-wing media than in left-wing media. So, I think you could make that argument. I guess what I would also say is that the kind of irony I have in mind is not a cool kind of irony. It’s an irony that is used to cover or to excuse extreme statements. Someone like Nick Fuentes will say things like, “Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.” Or, “I don’t want to return to 1999. I want to return to 1099.” He will say all sorts of outrageous things, but then if he gets called on it, he will say, “Oh folks, I didn’t literally mean it.” I think outrage and irony go together and that the most extreme forms of outrage are sometimes excused or covered up with irony.

This is the first in a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, a  Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.