The Enlightenment’s Legacy Is Solid, No Matter What Its Detractors Say

Liberalism's triumphs often don't make front page news. That doesn't mean the populists are right that ours is a world in ruins.

Here are some headlines from the last couple of months. Donald Trump won the New Hampshire Republican primary, all but securing his party’s nomination for the November election. Tucker Carlson traveled to Moscow to give a softball interview to Russian leader Vladmir Putin, who tried to justify his indefensible invasion of Ukraine with a meandering dissertation on Russian history. On X (formerly Twitter), conservative commentator Matt Walsh praised Putin’s answers as “intelligent” and “scholarly,” superior to U.S. President Joe Biden. In Yemen, Houthi militants have continued to attack commercial ships, keep Yemenis in slavery, and hand down death sentences for homosexuality. Meanwhile, in the relative safety of Western cities, pro-Houthi activists have taken to chanting “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!”

Let’s also consider what’s not making the news. The world is experiencing another wave of COVID-19 driven by the new JN.1 variant. However, thanks to widespread vaccination, the rates of illness, hospitalization, and death are vastly lower than they were at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. A new wave of COVID-19, headline news three years ago, is now on the back pages. Yet anti-vaccination sentiment continues to grow in mainstream politics, and high-profile vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is now running for president.

There are two troubling trends behind all these stories. One is the widespread acceptance of misinformation. From the moment he entered presidential politics, Donald Trump began spreading baseless conspiracy theories about his political opponents. He accused Ted Cruz and the Iowa Republican Party of conspiring to rob him of victory in the 2016 Caucus. His irresponsible grandstanding led directly to the fatal storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and he now faces 91 felony charges across several jurisdictions. His supporters either don’t believe these charges have any substance or they don’t care if they do.

In November 2023, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man—and thanks to his ownership of X, one of the most influential—posted: “You have said the actual truth” in response to the antisemitic claim that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” He had a message for advertisers who quit the platform in response to his boosting of conspiracy theories: “go fuck yourself.”

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That You Haven't Been Told

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Vaccine skeptics have minimized the success of COVID vaccines and shone a spotlight on the relatively rare incidents of side effects. Over 13.5 billion doses have been administered to 70 percent of the world’s people as of February 2023. While a small number have suffered vaccine injuries, even fatal ones, the percentage is tiny, much less than hospitalizations and deaths from COVID. In December 2022, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration had linked 17 deaths to COVID vaccines out of over 64 million doses administered in the country up until that time. Despite this, scores of people have refused the vaccines in favor of ineffective or outright unsafe alternatives, such as poisoning themselves with livestock medication.

The second trend is a growing contempt for liberal democracy on the political fringes. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was met with condemnation across the political spectrum contrasting with excuses, apologies, or outright cheerleading from a bizarre coalition of the far left and far right. While sensible commentators unequivocally condemned Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, even if they recognized that the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and quashing of efforts at Palestinian statehood are both unjust and unsustainable, sections of the hard left openly praised Hamas. “Yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anti-colonial struggle” the Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America posted on X. “Despite 75 years of occupation, Palestinians are standing tall against apartheid. On Indigenous Peoples Day, we are gathering in solidarity on the New Haven Green. No peace on stolen land!”

To the populist right, a strong leader able to crush hollowed-out “woke” institutions looks more appealing than the messy reality of trying to win votes among people motivated by practical concerns like housing, jobs, and healthcare. While to the radical left, the United States and its allies are so reprehensible that their enemies, no matter how warlike and reactionary, look appealing.

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The Anti-Liberal Internationale

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The great irony is that, if they live in Western countries, all these people are beneficiaries of the principles they are working so hard to overthrow. Three hundred years ago, everyone in Europe lived in societies not all that different from Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen: run by authoritarian monarchs and churches—cruel, oppressive, and violent. Constitutional government, the scientific method, and the building of a body of scientific authority, the rule of law and the recognition of human rights made the foundation of our progress. This Enlightenment project was not inevitable, took a lot of work and some luck, and is certainly not irreversible.

The Enlightenment’s detractors are inevitably selective in their criticism. Anti-vaxxers freely go to hospitals to avail themselves of the benefits of modern medicine developed and tested using the same principles as the vaccines they believe are a con. Western radicals use their freedom of speech to praise the Houthis while the Houthis and their sponsors in Tehran kill dissidents.

Fortunately, fringe views are, for the moment, relatively fringe. According to 2022 research, fewer than 10 percent of Americans, Britons, and Canadians are outright anti-vaxxers. Support for the institutions and values of liberal democracy remains robust. But social media allows people to restrict their information diet like never before, and for some, this diet is decidedly unhealthy.

It’s important to take the concerns of those who have lost faith in the Enlightenment project seriously. The globalized economy, itself a product of the Enlightenment principles of freedom, universalism, and the breakdown of the old distinctions of nation and class, has had uneven results. To those suspicious of economic and cultural elites, populist messaging can be comforting.

Protecting the Enlightenment’s legacy will need practical solutions. But on the evidence, defending the Enlightenment project is much easier than criticizing it.