Announcing the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism

Readers may have noticed that I’ve been ramping up activity at Symposium recently. As we reach the end of a second year, it’s time to intensify our efforts to bolster the intellectual defense of a free society.

To support this, I have created the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism, a 501c3 non-profit foundation that will support our efforts: commissioning new articles, producing our podcasts, and eventually hosting in-person events where we will gather together thinkers across the usual partisan lines to talk about the ideas at the basis of a free society.

You can make a donation to support the Foundation by way of Donorbox:

Or through PayPal:

And if you are a reader of Symposium and a listener of our podcasts and videos, please renew your subscription.

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Consider just two recent items in the news. The first is a publisher’s use of blue-nosed “sensitivity readers” to re-write beloved children’s stories from Roald Dahl. The second is schools in Florida emptying out their libraries because of a draconian law that makes it a felony for a teacher to allow access to an unapproved book.

One of these stories is brought to us by illiberal forces on the left, the other by illiberal forces on the right. But does that really matter?

Children’s literature is always the canary in the coal mine for liberal values, because it is very tempting for scolds and censors to claim that they are doing it “for the children.” But what is clear is that both of these cases are driven less by a concern for tender young minds than by a mania for control. Given that Florida is also imposing ideological restrictions on its public universities, it is also clear that these are precedents that will be used—are already being used—to restrict what adults can say and read.

I think we are making progress against some of the more outrageous variants of illiberalism. Dahl’s publisher, for example, has partially mitigated its bowdlerization by promising to make the original “classic” versions of the books available. But the threat never really goes away—bowdlerization, for example, is named after Thomas Bowdler’s expurgation of Shakespeare in 1807—and I still think things will get worse before they get better. We need to be ready for a long battle.

More to the point, much of the current threat to liberalism comes from the corruption of established institutions, from publishers to universities to think tanks. O’Sullivan’s Law famously declared, “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.” But one of the more disturbing drivers of the current illiberalism on the right is the transmogrification of conservative institutions like Claremont or the Manhattan Institute that were once more libertarian-leaning and are now full-on culture warriors. Given that the man who coined O’Sullivan’s Law, conservative writer John O’Sullivan, later founded the Danube Institute—which uses Hungarian government money to promote the influence of Viktor Orban’s authoritarian regime among Western intellectuals—I think we need an updating of his law. All right-wing organizations that are not explicitly classically liberal will over time become authoritarian nationalist.

We need new institutions that will be explicitly liberal—that is, they will exist to argue for freedom as the central value of a civilized society. We need new institutions that will help rebuild the neglected intellectual case for a free society and reach across the old partisan lines to forge a new liberal ideological coalition.

That is what Symposium has already been doing, and with your help we will do it on a larger scale through the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism.

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We have a great deal in the works already: a series of discussions on the legacy of the Enlightenment; upcoming overviews of the threats from both the left and right to free speech and free inquiry in public schools and colleges; debates over the relationship between liberalism and religion; lessons for the US from the struggle against authoritarianism overseas; an overview of reform campaigns where the fight for freedom has support across the old partisan divides; and much more.

But Symposium’s ability to grow will depend on your support and the activity your money makes possible.

Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution now.