Ekins, "Some Features of Liberalism in a Censorious Age"

I'll be excerpting and linking from the essays from our conference this summer on Liberalism's Limits: Religious Exemption and Hate Speech. The first contribution to the panel on the conference's general themes is by Richard Ekins, "Some Features of Liberalism in a Censorious Age." A bit from the conclusion:

Liberalism imagines a community united by consent and by a common scheme of principle, in which maximal autonomy is the end and affirmation of the autonomous choices of others is the means. This is neither coherent nor stable, as the transgender controversy confirms. But it does help explain public hostility, on the part of social and political elites, to those who dissent, viz. those who adhere to other faiths and/or refuse to affirm autonomous choices that they think are wrongful. Liberalism primes its adherents to misunderstand religious or other dissenting action as contemptuous of others, failing to perceive the significance of the intentions on which dissenters act, and wrongly running together person and action in a way that misrepresents disagreement as hatred. On this view, dissent from liberal principles is a kind of heresy, which needs to be purged for the good of all, or a kind of treason, in which the dissenters are imagined to be acting in breach of the fundamental grounds of our social and political compact. One sees this perspective in play in the hysterical way in which some liberal commentators respond to (occasional) political setbacks. If liberalism is a false faith, exposing its contradictions is unlikely to change the way in which dissenters are treated, but it may be a necessary step in framing a response.