Liberalism defines itself as anti-totalitarian, it is the ideology of freedom. There are certain qualifications here. Freedom is the freedom of the individual and the nature of his freedom is freedom from oppression rather than freedom to possess or have something. The word “liberal” in the United States is associated with the Left, whereas in Australia or the United Kingdom tends to refer to classical liberalism of Locke and J S Mill, which in the Anglo Saxon countries at least is associated with conservatism. In any event the argument here is that all ideologies have a tendency towards totalitarianism and that liberalism is not immune from this tendency.
It must be acknowledged that the thinker in the vanguard of this is Alexander Dugin, whose Fourth Political theory is predicated on the claim that all three ideologies, Fascism, Marxism and Liberalism have a totalitarian logic to them. We have seen recent manifestations of totalitarian moves in Anglo Saxon countries. Canada froze the bank accounts of protesters against Covid measures that would affect the livelihood of their trucking businesses. Australia was notorious for its Covid lockdown measures. The United Kingdom is imprisoning people for expressing controversial opinions on social media in the wake of a brutal murder of innocent little girls.
The classical liberal would argue that these moves were contrary to the principles of liberalism, but that does not change the fact that liberalism is by definition reductive. It does as someone like Robert Nozick argues have certain transcendental principles that come from a mysterious origin - property rights have a real as opposed to nominal existence for example. He derives this from Locke who was a nominalist on every aspect of reality bar rights of property. This aberration is not usually explained.
We have noted above the distinction between classical liberals and those liberals of the Left. This is only a relevant nuance from within liberalism. All forms of liberalism reject the old hierarchies of value as oppressive and preventing individual self expression. What seems a fundamental difference to liberals, as they argue amongst themselves, in terms of negative and positive liberty is merely a fine detail from other perspectives. The key point is, apart from the anomaly of property rights having real existence for classical liberals, real metaphysics have no claim upon our ethical behaviour. We are not participating in a higher or collective meaning, but pleasing ourselves alone. The one standard that unites liberalism of Right and Left is the individual is the measure of all things - that might be to withhold his possessions from others or it might be to impose obligations upon others for my own right to certain things - such as restricting freedom of speech so as not to be harmed by offensive comments. The person concerned with imposing upon others is still concerned about themselves as an individual and not about higher Good.
So liberalism sees any higher Good as oppressive and the enemy of individual liberty. This is because the liberal atomises the person as an individual neither linked to any vertical or horizontal good. He is disconnected from God and his neighbour. In this sense that other Enlightenment ideology, Marxism, has an unexpected family resemblance to liberalism. Marx too rejects any higher principle other than the materialist physical laws of science whereby yes at first collective action throws off the oppression based on the false consciousness of higher values, but this is to attain eventually pure individual liberty unencumbered by the demands of tradition, society or religion. Marx was at heart a liberal too.
This liberalism is rooted in nominalism and the idea of each individual being his own isolated monarch. In other words the cosmos follows the law of power not of any higher value such as Dante’s motivating love. Hobbes was as much of a liberal as Locke.
The liberals reduce all to a mere contract, relying on a fictitious or imaginary state of nature that provides the basis for a contractual form of government. This is the ideology of the money-driven mercantile class. Any sense of a higher meaning to our world is rejected and the powers and thrones and dominions of the heavens are ignored. Instead we exist in an arbitrary world where the only solid fact is supposedly the individual. Here the person is imagined as the modern buffered as opposed to the porous self of the ancient and Mediaeval worlds. This distinction is set out by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In the enchanted pre-modern world people were participating in higher meaning and vulnerable to infiltration by infernal forces. Human life was a microcosm of the cosmos, holding the cosmos together as the imago dei, not an arbitrary random individual disconnected from everything and everyone else.
How though does this contractual state, protecting us from the arbitrary state of nature, lead to totalitarianism? Well Hobbes is the first to provide an answer. For the sake of freedom from the misery and state of war that the state of nature leads to, we surrender to an authoritarian state. Underlying every liberal perspective is the secret belief that the State is there to protect individual rights and we have therefore contracted away absolute freedom.
Whether it be to protect property rights or protect my rights to self determine my gender (given only the individual perspective counts - realism is rejected), the State is there to enforce those rights.
We can see two trends in the modern West - the growth of private property rights in every aspect of life that can be enforced and also the enforcement of the individual’s right to determine reality in restrictions to freedom of speech. Without any sense of a higher reality above the individual there is no limit to enforcement potentially if individual rights are violated.
The negative liberty of private property rights comes to have power of legal enforcement over public areas. Monopolies occur and public goods become private without individual rights being violated, but we find ourselves trapped in a world of enforcement. There is no hope of everyone having the private property envisaged by Chesterton of three acres and a cow - most of us end up as tenants subject to private enforcement companies. ON the other hand, in the world of woke liberalism, the statement of a true fact can lead to legal sanctions through cancel culture, or the destruction of one’s career. The State has the right to take children who want to change their gender from concerned parents on the basis of the sovereignty of the individual.
What happens with liberalism, as with all revolutionary movements, is that to secure liberation the ends justify the means and higher principles can be violated. It is no accident that the liberal ideology of utilitarianism, where individual pleasure, hedonism, is the measure, all principles can be violated to achieve the end in sight - there is no deontological limit to Bentham’s consequentialism. In the end we have the Panopticon of prisoners living according to their pleasure under absolute surveillance. Here the individual can be sated but observed, while higher ideas of human dignity are ignored.
It is the case that J S Mill with his rule utilitarianism tried to lever in a sense of value not really compatible with pure utilitarianism and that Nozick tried to synthesise Locke and Kant with a deontological emphasis on the metaphysical realism of individual freedoms, particularly private property rights. Both fall into the same problem that they have to rely on a level of metaphysical realism to reintroduce value and once that step is made, how does one avoid the scaling up to the Good, the True and the Beautiful? How does one avoid the case that there are real things of value, there is a real meaning over and above mere individual desires? Once we distinguish between pushpin and poetry or assert there is a metaphysical reality to property rights we are acknowledging the legitimacy of philosophical realism and a hierarchy of value. The individual is no longer the measure, there is instead a transcendent level over and above the individual.
The liberals were seeking a limit to arbitrary power, but their whole metaphysics are arbitrary and rooted in a radical scepticism that in the end can find no argument against oppression in the name of abstract and arbitrary individual rights.
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