Anti-Totalitarianism Is Better than Faux Liberalism

Many thanks to my three interlocutors for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully and thoroughly to my reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the anti-totalitarian revolution of 1989. Flagg Taylor is indeed right: this is a glorious anniversary well worth celebrating. It was and remains a victory for human liberty and dignity, a triumph of human nature (or the “human condition”) against the ideological Lie in all its manifestations, against all the myriad inhuman and suffocating mechanisms of “organized lying.” It is a commonplace among Western political philosophers and political theorists to associate totalitarianism with tyrannical monism, the forcible imposition of a single idea on the pluralism natural to a free society. This relativistic critique was championed by Isaiah Berlin and is the only kind of anti-totalitarianism tolerated by liberals. In the end, it is most inadequate.